I recently took a trip to New York City. The monotonous color scheme of the city in the Winter made it easy to pass by shops and pay no attention to what they actually were. Naturally, the trip offered some exceptional metaphors of online advertising basics. Read On
If used incorrectly, Google’s display network can be a huge headache to any pay-per-click search campaign. However, it also provides a vast market that compliments a search based marketing campaign. From the available features and tools currently used or beta, small business owners should be utilizing what it has to offer. Read On
Word of mouth is one of the most effective ways to grow your business—and the size of your email marketing list. The entire customer experience needs to be superior in order to get your word of mouth referrals started.
At VerticalResponse a huge number of the people who sign up for our service select “Word of Mouth” as the source for where they heard about our company. This obviously has a huge impact on our business and sales!
Below I’ve listed 6 easy ways you can tap into this referral potential by encouraging–and making it easy for–happy customers to tell their friends about you. Read On
Short post from me today, and many of you will be very tired of reading about this subject. If that’s you, feel free to move on to other posts. You won’t hurt my feelings.
However, there is still a large number of small business owners and marketing folks who persist in the notion that if you rank top-10 organically for a keyword (sometimes even top-20 or 30), that you shouldn’t bid for it with your PPC campaign. The reason is that you don’t want to cannibalize sales from SEO, which makes complete sense.
Except when that doesn’t happen.
When it comes to their business website, too many small business owners still cling to the false notion of, “If you build it, they will come.” The idea is that having a web presence will get the job done. Put up the site, get the products on there, slap the logo on it and watch the sales roll in, right?
Once upon a time, when the concept of a business website was fresh and exciting, that may have been true. But times have changed. You can’t crank out any old website and expect customers to magically line up like the cars leading to Ray Kinsella’s remote baseball field.
If you’ve been reading PPC blogs for any amount of time, you’ll notice that much of what you read seems to be tailored for businesses with big budgets and slick websites. Mind you, there’s tons of great advice and food for thought out there–it just may not help the SMB owner with limited development resources and budget.
Working at OrangeSoda has equipped me with a wealth of experience in dealing with the challenges of using PPC effectively with a less-than-perfect website. Here are a few of the most common problems I’ve come across, along with ideas for how to work around the problem without making wholesale changes to your website:
Facebook started out as a place for college students to connect with their classmates. Now it’s open to everyone. It’s become not only a social network, but an Internet marketing strategy. It’s easy to see how a person or small business can use Facebook but I’m interested in how a larger organization can participate.
Today I found the Mayo Clinic’s Facebook page (and an article on their online marketing strategy at 1to1 Media). And talk about a cool title – they have a “manager for syndications and social media.” Maybe I could trade in my “seo evangelist” title for something more like “social media marketing manager” here at OrangeSoda.
Here’s a quote from the 1to1 article on why the Mayo Clinic has a Facebook page: “Consumer self-expression brings authenticity and impact…If consumers are happy with their experience with the Mayo Clinic, and they tell others, it will undoubtedly help Mayo to grow its reputation and market presence.”
Notice how they used their name in the URL. Then they post stories from blogs (put a Google alert on your name and track your company or organization online). They also inserted RSS feeds to news and health information.
This is obviously for branding and for relationship-building.
Besides their reasons for building a Facebook Page, the Mayo Clinic is proactively building a strong reputation online.
When people search for them in search engines the results are full of quality information and web sites that reflect well on the company. That’s something every company should aspire to build.
