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Suggest You - 6 Critical Elements in Creating Successful Web-Marketing Campaigns
If you have a website then you are certainly interested in having it do as well as it possibly can in the search engine rankings. However, did you know that you do have some control over getting good rankings and increasing your traffic? That is right; you can take your website’s success into your own hands and increase your traffic and income by blogging and pinging. Don’t know what blogging and pinging are? Read on to find out!BloggingA blog is just the short way of saying web log, which can be compared to an online journal or diary. However, blogs don’t have to be personal information. They can include news, thoughts, opinions, challenges, history, and anything the blogger wants. The most important aspect of a blog is that it is updated on a schedule and a regular basis with fresh new content. Some bloggers add new content once a week while others blog daily or multiple times per day. This is where increased search engine rankings come into play. Since there is always fresh new content the site is given heavier weight than if no new content were provided. This results in higher search engine rankings and increased traffic.PingingA ping is simply a program that sends out a message to another server or computer in order to get a response. So, for instance, if you update your blog you want to ping the search engines so your pages are indexed and your site ranked higher.Why Blog and Ping?You probably know that if your website does not show up in the search engines you are unlikely to get a ton of a traffic, and if you have a website you want traffic. So, the best thing to do is write a regular blog, ping the search engines, and your site will get indexed significantly faster than it would otherwise. By putting in a little bit of extra work you are getting your site indexed with the search engines and inev
4. Information Format
Your Web-marketing campaign should consist of a variety of information vehicles that each build on one another, creating the image and delivering the information that will ultimately lead to a relationship.
Your Web-marketing campaign should be aimed at achieving more than just a sale; it should be aimed at creating a satisfied customer who will promote your company through word-of-mouth. To achieve this end you must deliver a variety of information to potential clients; information that attracts attention, narrows decisions, instructs usage, and promotes involvement.
Information as entertainment: when you want to establish a personality or image, your audio or video presentation should have some entertainment element. This entertainment element could be in the character of the presenter, the script or dialog being presented, or merely the style and panache of the voice-over announcer or on-screen actor.
Information as knowledge: there used to be a Buffalo-based clothing retailer that featured the slogan, 'an educated consumer is our best customer." They never had a sale, but all their clothes were discounted the same way on a sliding scale based on how long the merchandise was in inventory. All their advertisements explained their policy in clear, concise terms. They understood, that if customers know and trust their policy they would have confidence that they were buying from a legitimate retailer at a legitimate price.
Information as instruction: we live in a very complex world where products and services are increasingly complicated. If we want customers to take the leap of faith and buy our merchandise and hopefully upgrade to bigger, better, more expensive versions, then customers must understand how to use the product and also how to maximize the promised benefits from their purchase. Teaching people how to take better photographs with the camera you sell is a far better sales tactic that promoting an extra feature they will never use.
Information as involvement: we all know word-of-mouth is the best form of advertising. Getting your Web-audience involved in your campaigns through the use of contests, surveys, and interactive entertainments are only a few ways to get them involved. But the b
I have TWO critically significant questions for you! The same TWO questions that were asked of Six Thousand, Six Hundred people (6,600).1. "Do you receive as much praise, approval, and appreciation on your job as you feel you deserve?"2. "Would you likely perform your job better if you received more praise, approval and appreciation?"The answers may amaze you as much as they have others. The answers appear at the end of this article."Your ego is your self. It is the most personal, most self-oriented part of your mind. Your ego is your underlying spiritual substance or soul and regulates your mental state and self-esteem. Your ego shapes and modifies your attitude toward yourself and toward other people. Your ego directs your response to every action of other people directed toward you. It is by far the most sensitive part of your psychological and philosophical structure."Having an understanding of what our ego is and how it directs our every action enables us to communicate in a more positive manner. You influence people, to give you more of what you want, through psychological nourishment, ("ego food") and they are repealed, angered and violent when you feed them psychological poison.Psychological nourishment is mental (ego) food that makes you feel great about who you are and what you do. Psychological poison consists of actions and statements that belittle someone leading to negative results. Ego poison is the number-one cause of problems in the home, workplace, broken friendships, and societies. "Ego poison is the number-one cause of physical violence and murder!"Both psychological nourishment and psychological poison are learned behaviors. Dispensing ego nourishment wins cooperation of others, commands more improved performance, helps you close more sales and gains the support, love and respect of others.
Marketing can be an extremely frustrating and expensive exercise if we mistakenly view it as merely an advertising function. Any discussion of marketing should be preceded by a definition of exactly what we mean by marketing: marketing is not just sales, or advertising, or promotion, but rather a combination of all these functions plus more.
One comprehensive definition of marketing provided by authors' Boone and Kurtz in their book 'Contemporary Marketing Wired (1998)' published by Dryden Press states: "Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, services, organizations, and events to create and maintain relationships that will satisfy individual and organizational objectives."
This definition seems to satisfy all the basic requirements of marketing; a recognition of which must made before we can proceed to creating a successful Web-marketing campaign.
Six Critical Elements of Web-Marketing Campaigns
If your marketing efforts fail to deliver the results you want, it could be due to a lack of resources, or more likely the lack of achievable expectations and patience. Marketing is a strategic exercise requiring a commitment to a long-term comprehensive plan, not a short-term fix to create instant sales. Concentrating your resources on stand-alone advertising and promotional efforts without considering the more important conceptual marketing framework is a prescription for disaster.
Ultimately most business managers come to realize that one-time advertising and short-term big-splash ads are a waste of time and money, but the lure of quick-fix shotgun advertising based on old school broadcast and print distribution volume seems to be a business addiction that is hard to kick. Even deep-pocketed corporate advertisers keep plowing money into television advertising that has knowingly become increasingly irrelevant and ineffective.
With the growing realization that the marketplace is not what it used to be, more and more companies both large and small are turning to the Web as an alternative marketing environment capable of reaching a dispersed diaspora of 'Long Tail' (Chris Anderson, "The Long Tail", Wired Magazine) interested prospects with a relevant memorable marketing message.
Realizing that you now have an economically viable multimedia platform that evens the marketing playing field, you must carefully consider how to proceed. If you merely transfer your traditional print advertising and direct marketing mailings to the Internet, you will be left behind.
Any business can put together a successful Web-based marketing plan if they take the time to define the six critical elements of a Web-marketing campaign:
1. Marketing Purpose
2. Marketing Objectives
3. Presentation Vehicle
4. Information Format
5. Marketing Venue
6. Achievable Expectations
1. Marketing Purpose
Marketing is all about building a brand personality that relates to an interested audience of either business-to-consumer or business-to-business prospects. Prospects search-out brands that help them construct and maintain their own self-image or at least an image that they aspire to, an image that they are comfortable communicating to others. The purchase, for example, of a Macintosh computer says as much about who bought it, as it does about that person's computing requirements.
"Thus, while the psychological/emotional need is to construct, reconstruct, and maintain the self-identity, the socio-cultural need is to communicate to others the self-identity." -Ouwersloot & Tudorica, 'Brand Personality Propositions'.
Accepting the need to build a brand personality that legitimate prospects can relate to might very well mean rethinking exactly who you are as a company and exactly what you are offering on both a psychological, emotional and socio-cultural level.
Most companies have a well-defined list of functional benefits that they provide clients; but what you have to ask yourself is, what psychological, emotional, and socio-cultural benefits do you offer and are they represented by your corporate image or brand personality? And if you think this only applies to consumer product companies, you are mistaken. Every company from industrial widget suppliers to packaged goods manufacturers needs to define their personality in terms of the emotive benefits they provide.
2. Marketing Objectives
One of the most difficult things for small companies to accept is that sales are the result of establishing an appropriate marketing framework. Once you recognize that the real purpose of marketing is to create a relationship with your audience based on an emotional connection in the form of a brand personality, you are ready for the next step: defining your marketing objectives.
Successful marketing campaigns rely on strategies and tactics that grow out of defining eight important marketing objectives.
Awareness: objective one is to make your market audience aware of your existence, but name recognition alone won't bring in the orders.
Attention: objective two is to draw attention to your company, product, or service. Your market audience may be aware of your existence but not understand or care what you do or why they should be interested. You have to do something to attract their attention before they'll listen to what you have to say.
Comprehension: objective three is to explain to your market audience what it is you are offering them. Telling people you sell the best widget and provide the best service is meaningless - your audience must understand how their personal or professional lives are going to be improved functionally, emotionally, and socially. Most automobiles will get you were you want to go (functional benefit), but a Mercedes gets you there in style (emotional benefit) and displays to the world that you are a success (social benefit). When was the last time you saw a real estate agent drive around in a jalopy? As focused on closing the sale as real estate agents are, they instinctively know they must project a confident, comfortable, successful professional image.
Knowledge: objective four is to provide your audience with the ammunition they need to make the purchase. Your prospects need to justify to themselves, their corporate superiors, or maybe their spouses, their purchasing decision. Prospects must be educated, informed, and enthused with the knowledge that your company, product, or service is the right choice.
Behavior/Experience: objective five is the creation of a corporate culture that matches your brand personality. If prospects are frustrated or annoyed by their experience in dealing with you, your website, or your email landing page, then all the feel-good advertising in the world is wasted. The customer experience of dealing with your company must match the image you project.
Involvement: objective six is to evangelize your customers so that they become involved in promoting your product, service, or company to their friends and colleagues. People want to show-off their intelligence, good taste, and business acumen. If your product fulfills your customers' emotional and psychological needs, they will become your best sales people.
Ability: objective seven is to education your customers so that they can maximize the benefits from their purchase. Show customers how to increase their ability to achieve, perform, or excel by using your product or service. It is absolutely amazing how many 'how to' books are sold by third parties to supplement the dreadful instructions and manuals provided by manufacturers. Think about the message you are sending customers when they have to buy a book with the word "Dummies" in the title, just to make your product work.
Opportunity: objective eight is to give customers the opportunity to purchase you product or service either directly or through an appropriate channel of distribution. Spending money on advertising and promotion for things people can't get is not much value. If prospects can't satisfy their needs when they want to, you'll have missed your chance.
3. Presentation Vehicle
Old habits and ideas are hard to overcome. After all we are creatures of habit, more accurately we are creatures of pattern. We understand the world around us by absorbing familiar patterns of action and behavior. Patterns make it easier for us to deal with the complexities of modern life and the demands of everyday work. This is a good thing as long as these patterns serve our needs, but the world of marketing communication has changed.
There is a new marketing paradigm that needs to be accepted and new sets of behavior patterns that need to be acknowledged. There was a time when you used the phone book to lookup phone numbers and the local newspaper to find what movies were playing; but today, the first place people go is the Internet. Things have changed and businesses have to change with the times.
Sure every business has a website, that's a given, but most websites are nothing more than digital versions of company brochures or catalogues that have been pushed and pulled out of shape by SEO consultants selling the latest miracle marketing cure - more traffic. Never mind the appropriateness of the traffic, or the relevancy of the bloated SEO-massaged content, or the meaningfulness of the marketing message. Traffic by itself will not win the day or get you where you want to be - this is nothing more than the same old shotgun volume broadcast approach that we know doesn't work for most companies.
The real issue here is presenting relevant, meaningful, compelling, informative, memorable material on your websites and landing pages to an interested audience that actually cares what you have to say - just make sure you say something worthwhile.
So how do we do it? The answer is Web-based multimedia presentations. Now let's be clear what we are not talking about: we are not talking about adding meaningless background music or irritating banner animations to your site. What we are talking about is using audio and video to present information that establishes your expertise, creates your brand personality, and delivers your marketing message so it sticks in the minds of your audience.
4. Information Format
Your Web-marketing campaign should consist of a variety of information vehicles that each build on one another, creating the image and delivering the information that will ultimately lead to a relationship.
Your Web-marketing campaign should be aimed at achieving more than just a sale; it should be aimed at creating a satisfied customer who will promote your company through word-of-mouth. To achieve this end you must deliver a variety of information to potential clients; information that attracts attention, narrows decisions, instructs usage, and promotes involvement.
Information as entertainment: when you want to establish a personality or image, your audio or video presentation should have some entertainment element. This entertainment element could be in the character of the presenter, the script or dialog being presented, or merely the style and panache of the voice-over announcer or on-screen actor.
Information as knowledge: there used to be a Buffalo-based clothing retailer that featured the slogan, 'an educated consumer is our best customer." They never had a sale, but all their clothes were discounted the same way on a sliding scale based on how long the merchandise was in inventory. All their advertisements explained their policy in clear, concise terms. They understood, that if customers know and trust their policy they would have confidence that they were buying from a legitimate retailer at a legitimate price.
Information as instruction: we live in a very complex world where products and services are increasingly complicated. If we want customers to take the leap of faith and buy our merchandise and hopefully upgrade to bigger, better, more expensive versions, then customers must understand how to use the product and also how to maximize the promised benefits from their purchase. Teaching people how to take better photographs with the camera you sell is a far better sales tactic that promoting an extra feature they will never use.
Information as involvement: we all know word-of-mouth is the best form of advertising. Getting your Web-audience involved in your campaigns through the use of contests, surveys, and interactive entertainments are only a few ways to get them involved. But the be
When we are at a networking event or meeting a client, it's almost guaranteed that we will exchange business cards. Very often, without realising it, we are assessing our colleague by their business card, and asking ourselves: Is the business card professionally designed Is the business card crumpled at the edges? How does the weight of the business card feel - substantive or flimsy? Does it look like the business card has been made on their PC - or worse still does it have a message at the bottom of the card to say where you too can access free cards?I have collected thousands of business cards over my time in business and every time I am sub-consciously assessing the professional status of them and their business when I receive their business card. We review someones card at least 3 times: once on receiving it a second time when we put it in our pocket, folio or bag as we leave the meeting and a third time as we make a decision to keep it, transfer the information into our data bank or bin it!Our business card is a critical part of our marketing collateral and even if you can not afford to put in place other marketing materials, short changing the investment in developing a professional business card is definitely not something we should do if we are looking to develop a professional brand. When meeting someone in person, alongside how you present yourself in person, your business card can enhance or devalue the strength of your brand and how you are perceived by others. Here are four tips to enhance your brand through your business card: Ensure that you work with a professional designer to develop your business card. It's not whether you like the design, it's about whether it will represent your business effectively and professionally to your target audience
Any business can put together a successful Web-based marketing plan if they take the time to define the six critical elements of a Web-marketing campaign:
1. Marketing Purpose
2. Marketing Objectives
3. Presentation Vehicle
4. Information Format
5. Marketing Venue
6. Achievable Expectations
1. Marketing Purpose
Marketing is all about building a brand personality that relates to an interested audience of either business-to-consumer or business-to-business prospects. Prospects search-out brands that help them construct and maintain their own self-image or at least an image that they aspire to, an image that they are comfortable communicating to others. The purchase, for example, of a Macintosh computer says as much about who bought it, as it does about that person's computing requirements.
"Thus, while the psychological/emotional need is to construct, reconstruct, and maintain the self-identity, the socio-cultural need is to communicate to others the self-identity." -Ouwersloot & Tudorica, 'Brand Personality Propositions'.
Accepting the need to build a brand personality that legitimate prospects can relate to might very well mean rethinking exactly who you are as a company and exactly what you are offering on both a psychological, emotional and socio-cultural level.
Most companies have a well-defined list of functional benefits that they provide clients; but what you have to ask yourself is, what psychological, emotional, and socio-cultural benefits do you offer and are they represented by your corporate image or brand personality? And if you think this only applies to consumer product companies, you are mistaken. Every company from industrial widget suppliers to packaged goods manufacturers needs to define their personality in terms of the emotive benefits they provide.
2. Marketing Objectives
One of the most difficult things for small companies to accept is that sales are the result of establishing an appropriate marketing framework. Once you recognize that the real purpose of marketing is to create a relationship with your audience based on an emotional connection in the form of a brand personality, you are ready for the next step: defining your marketing objectives.
Successful marketing campaigns rely on strategies and tactics that grow out of defining eight important marketing objectives.
Awareness: objective one is to make your market audience aware of your existence, but name recognition alone won't bring in the orders.
Attention: objective two is to draw attention to your company, product, or service. Your market audience may be aware of your existence but not understand or care what you do or why they should be interested. You have to do something to attract their attention before they'll listen to what you have to say.
Comprehension: objective three is to explain to your market audience what it is you are offering them. Telling people you sell the best widget and provide the best service is meaningless - your audience must understand how their personal or professional lives are going to be improved functionally, emotionally, and socially. Most automobiles will get you were you want to go (functional benefit), but a Mercedes gets you there in style (emotional benefit) and displays to the world that you are a success (social benefit). When was the last time you saw a real estate agent drive around in a jalopy? As focused on closing the sale as real estate agents are, they instinctively know they must project a confident, comfortable, successful professional image.
Knowledge: objective four is to provide your audience with the ammunition they need to make the purchase. Your prospects need to justify to themselves, their corporate superiors, or maybe their spouses, their purchasing decision. Prospects must be educated, informed, and enthused with the knowledge that your company, product, or service is the right choice.
Behavior/Experience: objective five is the creation of a corporate culture that matches your brand personality. If prospects are frustrated or annoyed by their experience in dealing with you, your website, or your email landing page, then all the feel-good advertising in the world is wasted. The customer experience of dealing with your company must match the image you project.
Involvement: objective six is to evangelize your customers so that they become involved in promoting your product, service, or company to their friends and colleagues. People want to show-off their intelligence, good taste, and business acumen. If your product fulfills your customers' emotional and psychological needs, they will become your best sales people.
Ability: objective seven is to education your customers so that they can maximize the benefits from their purchase. Show customers how to increase their ability to achieve, perform, or excel by using your product or service. It is absolutely amazing how many 'how to' books are sold by third parties to supplement the dreadful instructions and manuals provided by manufacturers. Think about the message you are sending customers when they have to buy a book with the word "Dummies" in the title, just to make your product work.
Opportunity: objective eight is to give customers the opportunity to purchase you product or service either directly or through an appropriate channel of distribution. Spending money on advertising and promotion for things people can't get is not much value. If prospects can't satisfy their needs when they want to, you'll have missed your chance.
3. Presentation Vehicle
Old habits and ideas are hard to overcome. After all we are creatures of habit, more accurately we are creatures of pattern. We understand the world around us by absorbing familiar patterns of action and behavior. Patterns make it easier for us to deal with the complexities of modern life and the demands of everyday work. This is a good thing as long as these patterns serve our needs, but the world of marketing communication has changed.
There is a new marketing paradigm that needs to be accepted and new sets of behavior patterns that need to be acknowledged. There was a time when you used the phone book to lookup phone numbers and the local newspaper to find what movies were playing; but today, the first place people go is the Internet. Things have changed and businesses have to change with the times.
Sure every business has a website, that's a given, but most websites are nothing more than digital versions of company brochures or catalogues that have been pushed and pulled out of shape by SEO consultants selling the latest miracle marketing cure - more traffic. Never mind the appropriateness of the traffic, or the relevancy of the bloated SEO-massaged content, or the meaningfulness of the marketing message. Traffic by itself will not win the day or get you where you want to be - this is nothing more than the same old shotgun volume broadcast approach that we know doesn't work for most companies.
The real issue here is presenting relevant, meaningful, compelling, informative, memorable material on your websites and landing pages to an interested audience that actually cares what you have to say - just make sure you say something worthwhile.
So how do we do it? The answer is Web-based multimedia presentations. Now let's be clear what we are not talking about: we are not talking about adding meaningless background music or irritating banner animations to your site. What we are talking about is using audio and video to present information that establishes your expertise, creates your brand personality, and delivers your marketing message so it sticks in the minds of your audience.
4. Information Format
Your Web-marketing campaign should consist of a variety of information vehicles that each build on one another, creating the image and delivering the information that will ultimately lead to a relationship.
Your Web-marketing campaign should be aimed at achieving more than just a sale; it should be aimed at creating a satisfied customer who will promote your company through word-of-mouth. To achieve this end you must deliver a variety of information to potential clients; information that attracts attention, narrows decisions, instructs usage, and promotes involvement.
Information as entertainment: when you want to establish a personality or image, your audio or video presentation should have some entertainment element. This entertainment element could be in the character of the presenter, the script or dialog being presented, or merely the style and panache of the voice-over announcer or on-screen actor.
Information as knowledge: there used to be a Buffalo-based clothing retailer that featured the slogan, 'an educated consumer is our best customer." They never had a sale, but all their clothes were discounted the same way on a sliding scale based on how long the merchandise was in inventory. All their advertisements explained their policy in clear, concise terms. They understood, that if customers know and trust their policy they would have confidence that they were buying from a legitimate retailer at a legitimate price.
Information as instruction: we live in a very complex world where products and services are increasingly complicated. If we want customers to take the leap of faith and buy our merchandise and hopefully upgrade to bigger, better, more expensive versions, then customers must understand how to use the product and also how to maximize the promised benefits from their purchase. Teaching people how to take better photographs with the camera you sell is a far better sales tactic that promoting an extra feature they will never use.
Information as involvement: we all know word-of-mouth is the best form of advertising. Getting your Web-audience involved in your campaigns through the use of contests, surveys, and interactive entertainments are only a few ways to get them involved. But the b
Have you ever wondered what would happen in your QuickBooks file if you performed certain operations, but were too afraid to try? Did you know that you can experiment with your ideas, and not make a mess in your QuickBooks file?When you installed your QuickBooks file, you also installed Sample Company files. Intuit designed these so that you could experiment with any idea or concept you have, and not take a chance messing up your own file.Best Way to Experiment in a Sample QuickBooks FileOpen a sample company file, and perform the operation you want to try. Then, to check its effect, run reports.For example, if you are unsure what will happen if you establish a new item, establish it in the sample file. Go to the Items list of the sample file, press Control-N, and set it up however you think it should be. Then, go to the Write Checks, Enter Bills, or Invoice screen and use it in a transaction.Next, run reports. If you assigned the item to an Income, Cost, or Expense account, run a Profit & Loss report to find the transaction there.If you assigned a Bank, Asset, Liability, or Equity account to the Item when establishing it, run a Balance Sheet report to find it.You can also run a report on the Item itself. From the Items list, highlight the item. Right click. Scroll down to run a QuickReport. You will see all of the transactions where that Item was used.Be sure to verify the date range on the reports. The date you assigned to the transaction needs to fall within the date range of the report you run.How to Locate a Sample Company File in QuickBooks - Two WaysFirst Way1. Open QuickBooks. If the screen asks for you password, click Cancel. If the screen does not ask for your password (simply opening your QB file instead), go to File > Close Company/Logoff. Either way, you s
Attention: objective two is to draw attention to your company, product, or service. Your market audience may be aware of your existence but not understand or care what you do or why they should be interested. You have to do something to attract their attention before they'll listen to what you have to say.
Comprehension: objective three is to explain to your market audience what it is you are offering them. Telling people you sell the best widget and provide the best service is meaningless - your audience must understand how their personal or professional lives are going to be improved functionally, emotionally, and socially. Most automobiles will get you were you want to go (functional benefit), but a Mercedes gets you there in style (emotional benefit) and displays to the world that you are a success (social benefit). When was the last time you saw a real estate agent drive around in a jalopy? As focused on closing the sale as real estate agents are, they instinctively know they must project a confident, comfortable, successful professional image.
Knowledge: objective four is to provide your audience with the ammunition they need to make the purchase. Your prospects need to justify to themselves, their corporate superiors, or maybe their spouses, their purchasing decision. Prospects must be educated, informed, and enthused with the knowledge that your company, product, or service is the right choice.
Behavior/Experience: objective five is the creation of a corporate culture that matches your brand personality. If prospects are frustrated or annoyed by their experience in dealing with you, your website, or your email landing page, then all the feel-good advertising in the world is wasted. The customer experience of dealing with your company must match the image you project.
Involvement: objective six is to evangelize your customers so that they become involved in promoting your product, service, or company to their friends and colleagues. People want to show-off their intelligence, good taste, and business acumen. If your product fulfills your customers' emotional and psychological needs, they will become your best sales people.
Ability: objective seven is to education your customers so that they can maximize the benefits from their purchase. Show customers how to increase their ability to achieve, perform, or excel by using your product or service. It is absolutely amazing how many 'how to' books are sold by third parties to supplement the dreadful instructions and manuals provided by manufacturers. Think about the message you are sending customers when they have to buy a book with the word "Dummies" in the title, just to make your product work.
Opportunity: objective eight is to give customers the opportunity to purchase you product or service either directly or through an appropriate channel of distribution. Spending money on advertising and promotion for things people can't get is not much value. If prospects can't satisfy their needs when they want to, you'll have missed your chance.
3. Presentation Vehicle
Old habits and ideas are hard to overcome. After all we are creatures of habit, more accurately we are creatures of pattern. We understand the world around us by absorbing familiar patterns of action and behavior. Patterns make it easier for us to deal with the complexities of modern life and the demands of everyday work. This is a good thing as long as these patterns serve our needs, but the world of marketing communication has changed.
There is a new marketing paradigm that needs to be accepted and new sets of behavior patterns that need to be acknowledged. There was a time when you used the phone book to lookup phone numbers and the local newspaper to find what movies were playing; but today, the first place people go is the Internet. Things have changed and businesses have to change with the times.
Sure every business has a website, that's a given, but most websites are nothing more than digital versions of company brochures or catalogues that have been pushed and pulled out of shape by SEO consultants selling the latest miracle marketing cure - more traffic. Never mind the appropriateness of the traffic, or the relevancy of the bloated SEO-massaged content, or the meaningfulness of the marketing message. Traffic by itself will not win the day or get you where you want to be - this is nothing more than the same old shotgun volume broadcast approach that we know doesn't work for most companies.
The real issue here is presenting relevant, meaningful, compelling, informative, memorable material on your websites and landing pages to an interested audience that actually cares what you have to say - just make sure you say something worthwhile.
So how do we do it? The answer is Web-based multimedia presentations. Now let's be clear what we are not talking about: we are not talking about adding meaningless background music or irritating banner animations to your site. What we are talking about is using audio and video to present information that establishes your expertise, creates your brand personality, and delivers your marketing message so it sticks in the minds of your audience.
4. Information Format
Your Web-marketing campaign should consist of a variety of information vehicles that each build on one another, creating the image and delivering the information that will ultimately lead to a relationship.
Your Web-marketing campaign should be aimed at achieving more than just a sale; it should be aimed at creating a satisfied customer who will promote your company through word-of-mouth. To achieve this end you must deliver a variety of information to potential clients; information that attracts attention, narrows decisions, instructs usage, and promotes involvement.
Information as entertainment: when you want to establish a personality or image, your audio or video presentation should have some entertainment element. This entertainment element could be in the character of the presenter, the script or dialog being presented, or merely the style and panache of the voice-over announcer or on-screen actor.
Information as knowledge: there used to be a Buffalo-based clothing retailer that featured the slogan, 'an educated consumer is our best customer." They never had a sale, but all their clothes were discounted the same way on a sliding scale based on how long the merchandise was in inventory. All their advertisements explained their policy in clear, concise terms. They understood, that if customers know and trust their policy they would have confidence that they were buying from a legitimate retailer at a legitimate price.
Information as instruction: we live in a very complex world where products and services are increasingly complicated. If we want customers to take the leap of faith and buy our merchandise and hopefully upgrade to bigger, better, more expensive versions, then customers must understand how to use the product and also how to maximize the promised benefits from their purchase. Teaching people how to take better photographs with the camera you sell is a far better sales tactic that promoting an extra feature they will never use.
Information as involvement: we all know word-of-mouth is the best form of advertising. Getting your Web-audience involved in your campaigns through the use of contests, surveys, and interactive entertainments are only a few ways to get them involved. But the b
There was a lot of buzz recently over Alex Tew's Million Dollar Homepage. He made a million dollars within 6 months selling pixels for a buck a piece. This feat created a stir within the Internet Marketing Community and people were formulating million dollar ideas of their own. Many tried to replicate Alex's pixel phenomenon but without much success.Alex made us realize that making a million dollars online is possible and all it requires is some smart, out of the box thinking. In this article, I will try to categorize the ingredients required to formulate your own million dollar idea. The Internet is vast and you can get lost in all the information, unless you have a clear thinking.When you start working on your million dollar idea, you have to answer three essential questions - who will pay you, why will they pay you and how much will they pay you? Answer these basic questions to all your ideas and you will end up with a winner. Let us explore each of these individually.Who Will Pay You?This is the first question you have to ask yourself. From where are you getting your revenue? You can be paid directly by customers, which was the case with Alex's pixel website. Besides this, the most popular avenues used by Internet Marketers today are affiliate programs and contextual advertising like Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network. There are a lot of other methods you can get paid but we will stick with the ones mentioned because they are the most popular.When you want to come up with a million dollar idea, you should be clear about your revenue model. Each one of these methods can be rewarding if your idea is good. Some people may argue that getting paid directly by customers is the best model. But in my experience, you can do equally well with affiliate programs and contextual advertising.Why Will They Pay You?
Opportunity: objective eight is to give customers the opportunity to purchase you product or service either directly or through an appropriate channel of distribution. Spending money on advertising and promotion for things people can't get is not much value. If prospects can't satisfy their needs when they want to, you'll have missed your chance.
3. Presentation Vehicle
Old habits and ideas are hard to overcome. After all we are creatures of habit, more accurately we are creatures of pattern. We understand the world around us by absorbing familiar patterns of action and behavior. Patterns make it easier for us to deal with the complexities of modern life and the demands of everyday work. This is a good thing as long as these patterns serve our needs, but the world of marketing communication has changed.
There is a new marketing paradigm that needs to be accepted and new sets of behavior patterns that need to be acknowledged. There was a time when you used the phone book to lookup phone numbers and the local newspaper to find what movies were playing; but today, the first place people go is the Internet. Things have changed and businesses have to change with the times.
Sure every business has a website, that's a given, but most websites are nothing more than digital versions of company brochures or catalogues that have been pushed and pulled out of shape by SEO consultants selling the latest miracle marketing cure - more traffic. Never mind the appropriateness of the traffic, or the relevancy of the bloated SEO-massaged content, or the meaningfulness of the marketing message. Traffic by itself will not win the day or get you where you want to be - this is nothing more than the same old shotgun volume broadcast approach that we know doesn't work for most companies.
The real issue here is presenting relevant, meaningful, compelling, informative, memorable material on your websites and landing pages to an interested audience that actually cares what you have to say - just make sure you say something worthwhile.
So how do we do it? The answer is Web-based multimedia presentations. Now let's be clear what we are not talking about: we are not talking about adding meaningless background music or irritating banner animations to your site. What we are talking about is using audio and video to present information that establishes your expertise, creates your brand personality, and delivers your marketing message so it sticks in the minds of your audience.
4. Information Format
Your Web-marketing campaign should consist of a variety of information vehicles that each build on one another, creating the image and delivering the information that will ultimately lead to a relationship.
Your Web-marketing campaign should be aimed at achieving more than just a sale; it should be aimed at creating a satisfied customer who will promote your company through word-of-mouth. To achieve this end you must deliver a variety of information to potential clients; information that attracts attention, narrows decisions, instructs usage, and promotes involvement.
Information as entertainment: when you want to establish a personality or image, your audio or video presentation should have some entertainment element. This entertainment element could be in the character of the presenter, the script or dialog being presented, or merely the style and panache of the voice-over announcer or on-screen actor.
Information as knowledge: there used to be a Buffalo-based clothing retailer that featured the slogan, 'an educated consumer is our best customer." They never had a sale, but all their clothes were discounted the same way on a sliding scale based on how long the merchandise was in inventory. All their advertisements explained their policy in clear, concise terms. They understood, that if customers know and trust their policy they would have confidence that they were buying from a legitimate retailer at a legitimate price.
Information as instruction: we live in a very complex world where products and services are increasingly complicated. If we want customers to take the leap of faith and buy our merchandise and hopefully upgrade to bigger, better, more expensive versions, then customers must understand how to use the product and also how to maximize the promised benefits from their purchase. Teaching people how to take better photographs with the camera you sell is a far better sales tactic that promoting an extra feature they will never use.
Information as involvement: we all know word-of-mouth is the best form of advertising. Getting your Web-audience involved in your campaigns through the use of contests, surveys, and interactive entertainments are only a few ways to get them involved. But the b
Last year, the best investment we made was adding TiVo to our entertainment system. The system heightens the time we spend watching our favorite programs. We enjoy the feature of stopping the action, slowing it down and rewinding anything to watch it again. The best part of using TiVo is we no longer miss something important, particularly in a mystery or when someone says something important.Fortunately, we are each built with an automatic TiVo feature in our head called memory. Although it isn’t digital, it works just like a computer because we can rewind and slow down the events of anything we want to remember. The only thing we must do is concentrate more on the event when it is taking place. This means that we can’t be thinking about what we are going to say next or what we are going to have for dinner tonight. It is also critical that we capture the details of the contact immediately after the event.Understanding the TiVo Mind SetI was taught to take good notes on appointments and listen carefully to what the person was saying. If I didn’t understand or missed something, it is okay to ask them to repeat it for clarification. This sounds like TiVo because, I’m asking them to rewind and replay what they were saying. When I do this numerous times, the client will appreciate my interest in what they are saying. This is always a good thing in sales.After each appointment or sales call it is important to mentally review what happened and record the important details of the call. This can be done on paper or using a digital voice recorder to document the essential information. We should also ask ourselves what we did right and what we could have done differently or better on the sales call.TiVo Your Important Sales AppointmentsTiVo isn’t anything new. We are born with the mental capacity to record, rewind and pla
4. Information Format
Your Web-marketing campaign should consist of a variety of information vehicles that each build on one another, creating the image and delivering the information that will ultimately lead to a relationship.
Your Web-marketing campaign should be aimed at achieving more than just a sale; it should be aimed at creating a satisfied customer who will promote your company through word-of-mouth. To achieve this end you must deliver a variety of information to potential clients; information that attracts attention, narrows decisions, instructs usage, and promotes involvement.
Information as entertainment: when you want to establish a personality or image, your audio or video presentation should have some entertainment element. This entertainment element could be in the character of the presenter, the script or dialog being presented, or merely the style and panache of the voice-over announcer or on-screen actor.
Information as knowledge: there used to be a Buffalo-based clothing retailer that featured the slogan, 'an educated consumer is our best customer." They never had a sale, but all their clothes were discounted the same way on a sliding scale based on how long the merchandise was in inventory. All their advertisements explained their policy in clear, concise terms. They understood, that if customers know and trust their policy they would have confidence that they were buying from a legitimate retailer at a legitimate price.
Information as instruction: we live in a very complex world where products and services are increasingly complicated. If we want customers to take the leap of faith and buy our merchandise and hopefully upgrade to bigger, better, more expensive versions, then customers must understand how to use the product and also how to maximize the promised benefits from their purchase. Teaching people how to take better photographs with the camera you sell is a far better sales tactic that promoting an extra feature they will never use.
Information as involvement: we all know word-of-mouth is the best form of advertising. Getting your Web-audience involved in your campaigns through the use of contests, surveys, and interactive entertainments are only a few ways to get them involved. But the best way to get people involved in evangelizing your product is to provide an experience that echoes their psychological, emotional, and socio-cultural aspirations.
Information as promotion: let's face facts, the vast majority of website visitors are jaded and cynical and hypersensitive to unscrupulous online businesses. Most of your Web-audience puts you right next to politicians and used car salesman in the trust department. You are not going to overcome this lack of confidence with a website that smacks of high pressure or alternatively a website that bores people. Present your offer using real people delivering a well crafted message that reflects your company persona and inspires confidence rather than puts out danger signals.
5. Marketing Venue
The Web's multimedia capability has often been equated to an egalitarian form of television, where every company has a shot at attracting an audience without the high cost of buying airtime, but like television it is the programs people are attracted to, not the commercials. If your website is nothing more than a commercial your visitors will hyperlink themselves away from your site at warp speed.
If we equate the new multimedia Web to television, we must construct our websites as if they were programs, not brochures. An excellent example of this new style website is the Ford Motor Company's 'Bold Moves' site (http://www.FordBoldMoves.com).
Your email marketing and Adword campaigns are the equivalent of program teasers, attracting people to your main site, campaign micro-site, or landing page based on a content hook and promise.
6. Achievable Expectations
We are all concerned about ROI but you cannot expect instantaneous results. Websites are long-term investments that must be continually tweaked to conform to your long-range strategic objectives. You must have realistic achievable expectations: new leads, customer inquiries, information requests, newsletter sign-ups, and even complaints. You cannot determine the value of your site based on direct sales alone. If you are not achieving adequate results, then it's time you rethought your website strategy in terms of it's multimedia content and program potential.
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