Influencer?

An influencer is someone who is know as an expert when it comes to your industry. They know what companies are working on, they know what products are good and which ones aren’t. The most important thing you need to know about an influencer is that they have a voice that is trusted by their peers and that means opportunity for you and your company.

Why Is The Influencer Important?

There are several reasons why you want these influencers on your team. They will help drive your word-of-mouth campaign on and off of Social Media. People will ask them what they think about your new product and they will trust what they say a lot more than they will ever trust an advertisement. Once they give their opinion on your product or service, that is what all of their readers, followers, and friends are going to believe. Think of these people as an extension to your brand. If they are happy than all of their followers are happy, if they are standing up for you, so are their followers.

Where Can I Find Them?

One thing to keep in mind is that any one of your customers can be a powerful influencer. Look around on industry blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter profiles to find the people who are speaking loudly and often. Look for consumer review blogs that are high in traffic and in feedback.

How do I win them over?

Once you identify some of the important influencers you want to connect them to your company is the least invasive way possible. You can do this through on all Social Media channels by linking to them, re-tweeting, @ tagging, etc. You can also comment on the content the publish and in places you know that they will be reading. If your company shows them respect as a leading voice in the industry, they will start to spread the good word about your brand.

Rich Timmons is the founder of Timmon & Company.

We are a marketing SWAT team. We are a well-trained, fast-moving, strategically-oriented group of creative marketing professionals. We quickly assess our clients’ marketing objectives, create a strategic plan, recommend tactics, produce Madison Avenue quality creative, and implement the plan, on time and on budget.

http://www.timmonsandcompany.com

There are no posts related to Why The Influencer Should Be Your New Best Friend.

Social media is rapidly escalating in popularity as a marketing tool.

Printing and postage costs keep increasing.

You are probably wondering why even bother with Direct Mail. It’s antiquated and ineffective.

The USPS even has stats to support that opinion. In their annual Household Diary Study, they published that US households received 85 billion pieces of direct mail advertising in 2009, which was 15 % less than in 2007 and 2008.

So is there a future for direct mail? It appears there is!

According to the 2010 DMA Statistical Fact Book, 79% of households either read or skim junk direct mail advertising sent to their home. Within that 79% – only 38% are skimmers, with readers encompassing a whopping 62%!

That same publication also predicted that spending on direct mail marketing is expected to increase by more than $1 billion in 2010.

Why, if it’s so outdated?

It seems that even with the widespread use of emails, texting and social media, the average consumer has a soft spot for direct mail. Almost 75% percent of consumers say they prefer to receive promotions or offers by mail, compared to 18 percent who prefer e-mail for such communications.

So why do consumers prefer mail?

* It’s familiar – it has been around for awhile (the first modern mail-order catalog was produced in 1872)
* It’s less frantic – no flash animation or demands for immediate response
* It’s convenient – mail can be taken anywhere and read at leisure
* It’s extremely versatile! – it’s much easier to be creative and set yourself apart through mail than with a formatted HTML or text message

E-mails and Texting are great marketing tools, however many marketers aren’t targeting their audience enough and consumers are finding their in-boxes are just getting too cluttered. They spend most of their time deleting e-mails rather than reading e-mails promoting genuine business offers.

According to a study commissioned by Pitney Bowes, 31% of consumers are less likely to discard unopened mail than they are to delete unsolicited e-mails (53.2 %).

If you aren’t totally sold on direct mail as an effective marketing medium, consider this – in 2009 the average consumer received 24.7 pieces of mail per week. That’s the fourth straight year that shows a drop in volume. At the very least this means there’s less of a crowd to stand out in.

By using a less crowded medium, you’ll find improvement in your response rates. Response rates will further improve if you can identify your target market and personalize your message. You can even try combining it with a Telemarketing, Opt-in Email and/or SMS/Texting campaign. Give the recipient something that’s visually appealing and tangible. Something to hold in their hands which gives them a definite call to action. Visit our website… Call us now… Text the following word to this number…

Many feel that Direct Mail is a thing of the past. However, if you target properly and are creative, it is still a useful and relevant medium to reach out to your customers.

Greg Rubin is the Senior List Broker at Prospects Influential Inc., a respected direct marketing list brokerage company with 32 years of experience in the Direct Marketing and List Brokering industry. We invite you to visit our website at http://www.prospectsinfluential.com for more information on Direct Marketing and how we can help improve your Direct Marketing Campaign results.

There are no posts related to The Future of Direct Mail.

But some marketers think it’s a colossal waste of time. Is it worth the time and energy it takes to launch a social marketing campaign?

Well, to evaluate whether social marketing is a worthwhile strategy, let’s look at some of the ways that social marketing can build your business

1) Viral marketing. Putting your company and your products on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Squidoo, and FriendsWin encourages people to tell their friends about you.

The more you interact with other internet users through these sites, the more people will become excited about your products. And when you’re excited about something, don’t you naturally want to tell other people about it?

There’s a common myth that people only tell friends about negative experiences with companies and products. It’s simply not true. Myspace didn’t acquire 330 million accounts without viral marketing. Likewise, FriendsWin didn’t add 25,000 subscribers in 3 months without word-of-mouth referrals.

Even products as simple as Beanie Babies (remember those?) were wildly successful because people told their friends about them, not because of aggressive ad campaigns.

2) Connecting with other business owners. Social marketing not only allows you to connect with potential buyers; it puts you in touch with other entrepreneurs who are marketing similar or complimentary products.

Gone are the days when every internet marketer acted like he or she was on an island, well-distanced from competing marketers. Today’s internet business environment demands that marketers work together toward mutual success.

Internet users simply don’t have the time and patience for endless advertisements, so it’s imperative that marketers work together to sell complimentary products to targeted, interested buyers.

For example, let’s say you’re selling high quality pizza baking stones. You could develop your marketing plan from scratch, and rely on SEO and pay-per-click to find customers who want to buy your pizza stones.

But what if, through your social marketing efforts, you found Joe, who sells premium pizza cheeses, sauces, and other ingredients imported from Italy?

Through cross-selling, you and Joe could develop a “one stop shop” where pizza lovers could find everything they need to bake great pizza at home. His customers don’t have to scour the internet looking for the perfect pizza stone, and your customers don’t have to hunt for premium pizza ingredients.

Providing this kind of convenience could easily generate more sales than either you or Joe could generate on your own.

3) Quality backlinks to raise your search engine ranking. Social networking sites like Myspace, FriendsWin, Squidoo, and Facebook all have tremendous pull with Google and other search engines. Linking to your website or blog from these sites can substantially improve your own search engine position.

It’s also an excellent way to get backlinks from people who like your products, and from other internet marketers. Remember viral marketing? Backlinks from customers and fellow marketers are simply an extension of this type of marketing. Even better, backlinks are not only highly effective, they’re free.

Sure, social marketing can be tedious and time consuming. There will always be entrepreneurs who tell you that social marketing takes up too much time to be effective. But if you have the patience and the vision to grow your business through social marketing, you’ll gain some pretty enviable advantages that will help you and your business succeed.

To learn about a new social networking site that is blowing the doors off of Myspace, please visit my FriendsWin page. Right now, you can also make money recommending the site to others, no matter whether you currently have a business, or are just looking for a legitimate way to make money on the internet.

There are no posts related to Is Social Marketing a Colossal Waste of Time?.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is the promotional activity designed for delivery to cell phones, smart phones and other handheld devices, usually as a component of a multi-channel campaign. Internet Retailer – the respected ecommerce magazine -projects sales received through eBay’s mobile website and application will be over $500 million this year. This alone should be proof that your business needs to take advantage of mobile marketing to stay competitive in today’s retail market.

Want more proof? The Kelsey Group, a renowned marketing research company, predicts that the mobile advertising industry will grow to $3.1 billion in 2013 up from $160 million in 2008. The firm also predicts that mobile search marketing will account for 73% of mobile marketing by 2013, up from 24% in 2008, and that SMS-based campaigns would shrink to 9%, down from 63% in 2008. Display-based campaigns are expected to stay relatively steady, up to 18% from 13%.

Typical mobile marketing today is similar to advertising delivered over other electronic channels such as text, graphic and voice messages. SMS messaging is currently the most popular delivery channel for mobile marketing. Search engine marketing is the second-most common channel, followed by display-based campaigns. But new technologies for mobile marketing are popping up as fast as next generation smart phones.

Here are just a few of the new capabilities mobile devices will feature:

• Augmented reality mobile campaigns, which overlay the user’s phone display with location-specific information about products and services.
• 2D barcodes, which are barcodes that scan vertically as well as horizontally to include much more information. A mobile user can scan barcodes in the environment to access associated information.
• GPS messaging, which incorporates location-specific messages that the user picks up when he comes into range.
• Location-based service (LBS), which detects the area the user is connecting from (geolocation) and sends marketing messages for businesses in that area.

Vesta Digital – a fully integrated website and mobile marketing developer – can show you how to capitalize on this new marketing trend with our mobile marketing services that include custom mobile website development and cutting edge applications.

Sofia Sapojnikova
Vesta Digital
http://www.vestadigital.com

There are no posts related to Grab Those Last Minute Holiday Shoppers with Mobile Marketing.

Every business needs some sort of marketing strategies. There are traditional methods like giving advertisements regarding the services and products in the local news papers, television channels, radio channels and much more. Similarly, online business also needs some effective marketing strategies. Many social media marketing sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and Better Networker and Wordpress blogger help the business vendors to do so. The possibility of creating your own profiles to brand yourself as a leader is also rewarding when these social platforms are used. You could present yourself well and promote to the maximum levels possible. Also, you can be of immense help to others if you can contribute to the success of others and you would have bright chances for your personal branding.

If you have an online business, there is noting that could stop you from being empowered by these social media marketing tools. The following would clearly highlight what the social media marketing tools could do for you –

- These tools would regulate the website traffic. It would be able to route the traffic from these networks to your site. It is important to have a customer to step into the store to buy products and services that you are offering. In the similar way, you need people to visit your site and this is done by regulating traffic through these social media marketing tools.

- User behavior could be known by the tracking system that the social media marketing tools offer. By keeping a keen eye on the same, you could interpret what the customers are looking for and could make the changes as concluded out of the users’ behaviors.

- These social media marketing offer tracking system which would not only keep a track of the conversions and the sales, but they would also be able to relate the investment made to the total revenue made through it.

- These would tell a great deal about the pages that are often visited and the information that is mostly scanned by the user. This could also help in generating leads.

- The social media marketing sites are really instrumental for establishing your brand and nurturing it further. Most of the people are using this to create their own profiles to promote as a leader.

- These social media marketing sites are also used to build brand associations as well. Linked In is a good example for the same.

Are you ready to learn all the benefits of social media marketing? Visit http://www.melissaannmitchell.com today for more information!

There are no posts related to Use SMM to Market What You Have to Offer.

Promote your blog? Why would you want to do that? Honestly, if you have to ask yourself that question you probably shouldn’t even have one. The whole purpose of a blog is to document your thoughts, views, and opinions on a particular topic, issue, or subject. What good will your blog do if no one reads it. In addition to sharing your thoughts with the rest of the world, did you know that you could also make money from your blog? You can signup for affiliate programs or other programs like Google Adsense. If you are using your blog to make money then you will defiantly want to promote it.

When it comes to promoting blogs, there are many blog owners who decide to let the search engine do the work for them. Search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN use special techniques that reads the content on your website. That content is then used to rank your website with particular keywords. This means that you run a blog on graduating from high school in New York, there is a good chance that your blog will appear in searches done on New York high schools. Although many blogs are successfully ranked in search engines, not all are. That is why you are advised against relying solely on search engines, when it comes to promoting your blog.

As previously mentioned, if you love meeting with or talking to people online, there is a good chance that you belong to a social networking website or community. The individuals that you talk to and that are in your community are likely the individuals that you wish to target. Since most social networking websites work to connect internet users who have the same goals and common interests, there is a good chance that your online friends will enjoy reading your blog. But, before they can read your blog, you have to let them know that it exists.

When it comes to promoting your blog on social networking websites, you have a number of different options. Your first option is to include a link to your blog in your community profile or profile page. This will allow other community members to checkout your blog, only if they wish to do so. The other way is to inform your online friends of your blog through private messages. Once you join a social networking website and create or join a network of friends, you should easily be able to communicate with those friends. Sending each of your friends a private message with information and a link to your blog tends to be more effective than just placing a link in your profile or on your profile page.

Although there is a good chance that you are already a member of a popular social networking website, you may not be. If you are not already a member, but would like to become one, you will need to find a social networking website to join. This can easily be done with a standard internet search. In your search, you will likely find a number of popular network sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, FriendFinder, Yahoo! 360, and Orkut. Before becoming a community member at one of these networking sites, you may want to first examine the website to ensure that it is everything that you want it to be.

As you can easily see, there are a number of different ways that you can go about promoting your blog on online social networking websites. You never known, but, in addition to promoting your blog, you may also make new friends along the way.

Home business coach, Khyl Ng wants to help entrepreneurs find the best online businesses available today. The businesses come with professional support and training resources that can guide even those with no experience making money online toward success. Kindly check out the website, http://www.K-HillzOnline.com lists only those businesses that gone through a thorough screening process to ensure they are legitimate, money-making ventures.

Incoming search terms:

• Powered by Article Dashboard construction companies
• Powered by Article Dashboard legitimate work from home
• Powered by Article Dashboard construction site
• Powered by Article Dashboard government home improvement loan
• Powered by Article Dashboard work at home internet
• Powered by Article Dashboard social class
• Powered by Article Dashboard online cooking classes
• Powered by Article Dashboard orleans cooking school
• Powered by Article Dashboard trailer sales
• Powered by Article Dashboard online meteorology guide

There are no posts related to Using Social Networking Websites to Promote Your Blog.

The future of healthcare marketing is not about saying things to caregivers, communities and patients. It is about saying and doing things with them. It is about Attraction Marketing, compelling audiences to become socially involved with your brand, while letting you (the healthcare marketer) actually spread your commercial message more effectively.

A Manifesto For Change

Based on the new laws of Attraction, here are twelve guiding principles for creating a connecting versus campaigning organization. I refer to these principles as an Attraction Manifesto because of what the term implies – passion, game-changing, an appropriately public (social) declaration of your intentions and how you’ll set out to achieve them. And because it’s a manifesto, it asks others (employees, caregivers, patients, communities) to join together to make it a reality. Clearly, you’ll put your own spin on this doctrine to make it actionable for your organization and your audiences.

1. Coherence – our brand idea will serve as the nucleus for all of our actions and communications.

2. Authenticity – our social media conversations should be similar to our daily interactions with friends, colleagues and family, in that they are open and honest, informal and in a personal voice.

3. Transparency – we’ll represent ourselves as people rather than an organization, because people connect with people, not organizations. We’ll also be honest about who we are, as trust is a huge barometer of engagement.

4. Collaborative – we’ll embrace the fact that true conversations are two-way, question and answer, give and take; where all participants strive for mutual respect and gain.

5. Customized – we’ll create specific interest content and communities (because the web allows us to do this) by collecting, categorizing, listening and responding.

6. Facilitating – we’ll allow conversations to go on around us without trying to control them, empowering people to connect through our brand, with content as the enabler.

7. Contagious – we’ll create “life-impacting” content and conversations that generate word-of-mouth and that people want to share with others.

8. Co-Creation – by working together, we all learn, grow and become stronger.

9. Evangelists – as feasible, we’ll create passionate and active advocates who will want to spread our message (for little expense).

10. Paced – we’ll start small, do what we can, when we can.

11. Context – we’ll recognize that social media is not a single solution in itself, but one element of an integrated marketing communications plan.

12. Bottom Line – we’ll leverage the tools available to measure our success both qualitatively and quantitatively.

What Are You Waiting For

Integral to the future of healthcare brand building will be shared, “real-time” interactions and conversations between providers, caregivers, patients and communities. You have the opportunity now to benefit your healthcare organization by involving and empowering these audiences in conversations by being where they are and making it easier for them to connect, get informed and take action. It’s not a matter of “if”, but “when.” So what are you waiting for?

Eric Brody is President of Trajectory branding, marketing, innovation (www.trajectory4brands.com) – a firm that is expert in re-energizing health + healthy lifestyle brands to create new value for customers, companies and shareholders. His Healthy Conversations blog can be found at www.ericbrodysblog.com.

There are no posts related to Creating An Attraction Manifesto: Becoming A Connecting Versus Campaigning Organization.

I’m sure you have already heard this expression and I can not express how true it is. If you are an online entrepreneur or the good ol’ fashion networker that hold parties at your home.

I’ve been dabbling in both the online and home parties now for about 2 years. I always seemed to have struggled, being that my home party sponsor was based out of Florida, while I’m based in New Jersey. Getting prospects to my house was almost impossible because, well, heck there was no excitement or someone to lead by example. My online businesses… well I took that on by myself. I bought programs to get leads, to generate leads, and well quite Frankly…again there was no excitement.

I truly believe I wasn’t doing anything wrong. It was that I wasn’t surrounding myself with the right people. Quite honestly, why would people follow me and be interested in what I have to say and become part of my inner circle.

I then came across a team, an existing team. A team that took me in, and was able to help promote ME, and show ME the ropes into online promotion and how to gather team members. Let’s face it, there are people that are naturals and can have an immediate following, BUT that is not the majority of us.

I did learn a lot of ’stuff’ while purchasing different programs and systems, but the difference is…now I have an audience. The audience that accepted me, and now willing to listen to me. We all gather from each others experience and we are able to hit the deck running.

All this time I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I just realized there is no I in TEAM.
http://www.shaqspayerplayer.com

There are no posts related to There's no I in TEAM.

Just in case you need a refresher, Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a unique micro-blogging tool that lets users communicate with their “followers” in quick text messages of 140 characters or less called “tweets.”

Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube are typically most effective when they are appropriately integrated with each other and with a company’s existing marketing efforts, since each one provides distinct benefits and advantages in an integrated social marketing plan. But Twitter – even when used as a stand-alone social networking strategy – can be a powerful tool in any small business marketing toolbox.

Some of the benefits of using Twitter in your marketing mix include:

• Highly targeted audience: The people who choose to “follow” you on Twitter are already interested in hearing what you have to say, or they would not have followed you to begin with. This provides you with an audience of folks who have specifically opted-in to receive your messages and want to listen to what you have to say.
• Instantly reach your “followers”: When you post something to your Twitter account (referred to as “tweets”), the message is instantly sent to your followers in the way they have chosen to be contacted. This could be a text message sent to their cell phone, posted to their Twitter page on the web, RSS-fed to a Facebook page or profile, etc. Regardless of the method your followers have selected, your tweets appear within a few seconds.
• Generate traffic to your web site: By adding links in your tweets, you provide followers with direct access to your web site, to other social networking profiles, to your blog, etc. Again, if your social marketing has been properly integrated, all of this will lead back to your web site, generating more traffic and new visitors.
• Improve your search engine rankings: By optimizing your Twitter profile (and integrating your social marketing efforts), you can build valuable inbound links to your web site, which is key in improving your site’s position in the search engine rankings.
• Increase brand awareness and online visibility: Being active on Twitter gets your business name in front of customers as well as the general public everyday, which in turn helps build name recognition and improves brand awareness for your business.
• Enhance customer service: Many businesses have found that by using Twitter, they can respond to customer needs (or complaints) very quickly and efficiently, allowing them to improve their level of service while publicly demonstrating their responsiveness and commitment to customers.
• Manage your online reputation in real time: By monitoring Twitter for mentions of your business name, key personnel, product names, etc., you can keep track of what people are saying about your business and to respond or intervene quickly if necessary. There are also free tools available to help you monitor your reputation in Twitter (like Twilerts and Tweetdeck), which can make it very easy to monitor your reputation online.

These are just some of the ways in which Twitter can benefit your business, and as social networking continues to grow in popularity, there will surely be even more features, new uses, and business benefits to be gained by using Twitter.

Whether you are just thinking about using social marketing or have already started to use it, Twitter can be a great tool to integrate into your social marketing strategy as you go forward. And for small businesses that are serious about marketing, the value of Twitter is pretty clear.

Lauren Hobson, President of Five Sparrows, LLC, has more than 16 years of experience in small business technology writing, marketing, and web site design and development. Five Sparrows provides professional website, marketing, and social networking services to small businesses and non-profits at affordable prices, giving clients access to customized services that meet both their needs and their budgets. More at www.fivesparrows.com

Incoming search terms:

• Powered by Article Dashboard help with science homework help

There are no posts related to How Can Twitter Help Your Business?.

Suppose you own a bakery. You have lots of loyal customers, but, like any business owner, you would like to have more. You create a free page on Facebook describing your business, and you update it frequently with news about special promotions or new product offerings. You encourage your customers to visit your page and become “fans” of it. When they do, you can send them automated updates, and they can visit your page with just one click from their Facebook accounts. To increase traffic to your page, you might decide to buy targeted ads on Facebook.

So far this approach is rather conventional. It is really no different from the way businesses have used the Internet for a number of years. But something else happens when people become fans of your Facebook page: the name of your business is added to their personal profile. Now all their Facebook friends see that they are fans of your business. Some of them become fans, and the process (you hope) just goes on and on. This is the essence of viral marketing: encouraging people to pass on a marketing message to others. If your message is appealing, it has the potential to spread exponentially throughout your community and beyond.

Facebook has actually taken the concept of viral marketing one step further. Suppose you decide to run a Facebook ad targeted to everyone in your local area. Suppose, also, that you have a Facebook page with 100 fans, and each one of those fans has 50 Facebook “friends.” When those friends see your ad, it will say something like this: “Sample our delicious baked goods. Your friend Adam Smith is a fan.”

Clearly the potential for viral marketing is enormous, but how do you measure its effectiveness? Earlier approaches to Internet marketing used some traditional methods of measuring how well an ad worked. For example, each ad might have a unique 800 phone number for responses. Or each ad might have a link to a coded discount coupon that customers could print out or use online. But these traditional methods don’t lend themselves to social media marketing.
Marketers have developed new approaches to measuring the effectiveness of a social media campaign. They measure such things as:

• Facebook fans and page views. Facebook offers a free tool called Insights that provides demographic and geographic data on your “fans,” as well as information on the number of visits your page receives and the number of page views.
• Del.icio.us. This strangely named site offers something called “social bookmarking.” People post bookmark lists on the site that are accessible to their friends. You can see how many people have added your site to their bookmark list and what key words they have used to “tag” your site.
• Number of Articles on Digg. If you use blogs or news articles to promote your business, people who like your content can forward it to Digg or other socials news sites. You can track how many of your articles have been submitted to these sites and how popular they are.

What is missing from these measurements is data on conversions (sales). As social media marketing matures, advertisers will keep looking for ways to measure results in terms of dollars rather than clicks.

Jaime Brugueras, Ph.D., is founder of Mineful.com, a market research and analysis software that caters both the powerful and occasional user. Mineful’s web-based software tools cover a range of marketing applications from data collection to advanced market analysis including segmentation, survey research, and predictive analytics. Sign up for a FREE unlimited time trial at Mineful.com.

Incoming search terms:

• Powered by Article Dashboard metric conversions

There are no posts related to Social Media Marketing Measurement.