Posted April 30, 2010 by admin under under
Majon InternationalSince being established in 1988, Majon International has been leading the way for many businesses with its exclusive, universal marketing, advertising, public relations and promotional services. They have enjoyed helping many entrepreneurs and businesses of all sizes launch various dynamic new and novel products, both nationally and internationally. They have the ability to clearly focus [...]
Tags: Advertising, affordably, business, Canada, ecommerce opportunities, exclusive marketing, exclusively, Google, international, launching, leading, Majon, Majon International, marketing, marketing segment, Matthew Hesser, novel products, online, online businesses, online marketing, promotional campaigns, promotional services, proprietary technology, public-relations, reputation, successfully, target marketing, Unique, United States, universal marketing, unlimited marketing, yahoo
Posted April 8, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click I probably don’t have to tell you that time is valuable, but is this something you are considering when it comes to your customers’ time? If you run an e-commerce business, you have to consider that consumers want to spend as little time on your site as possible. That’s not to say that they don’t want to buy from you. They just want to be able to do so quickly, and the more time you make them spend on the buying process, the less likely they are to actually buy from you
Tags: amp design, book, buying, competition, consumers, conversions, design, eley, live coverage, marketing, number, online marketing, shopping, time
Posted April 1, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click It used to be you spent five minutes registering for an event, and then showed up on the big day, went to a few workshops, drank two free Coronas, and went home. Social media changes all of that, enabling events and their planners to have long-term, nuanced, shifting interactions with attendees. I gave a speech last week in suburban Cincinnati to the Mid-American chapter of Meeting Planners International , titled “7 Ways to Use Social Media to Create Buzz-Worthy Events”. My recommendations are based on my work with MarketingProfs and ExactTarget to add social frosting to their already fabulous events, and my experiences speaking at several dozen conferences annually. There’s a total of 39 specific suggestions in the slides, but here are the highlights. 7 Ways To Use Social Media To Create Buzz Worthy Events View more presentations from Jay Baer . 1. Engage Get your potential attendees interacting with you early on by enabling some measure of feedback or crowd sourcing on the conference programming. South by Southwest has always led in this area, with its “panel picker” process that turns over 30% of the programming selection to potential attendees. An easier way to do this would be to utilize something like Crowd Campaign , which gives participants a way to suggest content, and for others to vote on it. Or, you could go even simpler, and use Tweetpoll or PollDaddy (As I did when I asked you for feedback on potential new designs for this blog). 2. Intrigue Almost all events have an official Web site. But very few (except for the geek events) take full advantage of all the free event listing and event management opportunities. At a minimum, you should create event pages on: – Facebook Events – Eventbrite (where you can also sell tickets, if you’re so inclined) – Upcoming – Linkedin (if it’s a business event) Sure, its a bit of a hassle to oversee all of these event pages, but your attendees swim in different ponds. Plus, every conference has the same MVP attendee: some guy named Google. Why would you pass up a chance to double, triple, quadruple your search engine listings? 3. Invigorate As the event draws closer, you have to pull potential attendees off of the fence with content hors d’ouerves Start a Twitter contest. Online Marketing Summit does this well, awarding free registration to the conference for people that can correctly answer marketing trivia via their Twitter feed. Get your speakers to produce teaser content. A simple video would be ideal. However, some speakers (either full of attitude or devoid of tech savvy) can’t handle the video creation process. In that case, set up a blog on Tumblr (for free, in about 10 minutes) and have your speakers call the toll-free number and leave a voicemail. It will be automatically transcribed, and posted to the official event blog. Speaking of blogs, consider setting up a Netvibes.com page for the event, and creating a centralized repository for all blog posts by speakers. Netvibes.com is free, and all you need to do is pick a layout, and then subscribe to the RSS feeds of each speaker’s blog. Use Pitchengine to create multi-media enabled press releases, and send the URL for the release to any and all “maybes” on your list. Gather social information from all registrants. Create a Twitter list of all attendees, and update it each time a new person registers. 4. Integrate Now we’re talking about the on-site experience, which is where social media can really add impact and get people talking. Pick a hash tag for your event, so attendees and remote watchers can monitor on Twitter. Shorter the better, please. Then, start your conference with an unofficial Tweet-up. It gets your likely content creators motivated and excited. I’m not a big fan of the geek conference staple of having a live, streaming Twitter wall behind speakers while they speak. Too distracting. But, I love having a big Twitter wall in a central conference location. This requires very little effort now, using something like Tweetwally . Create an event within the event by running contests on Twitter during the conference. My friend Dawn DeVirgilio at ExactTarget is great at this, with multiple small prizes per day. In this one, she hid gift cards around the conference, and took pictures of the locations. Whomever found it first, won. Here, she drove people to the Expo Hall, and awarding an unexpected, memorable prize – an upgrade to a hotel suite. 5. Inform I’m a big fan of voting via text message, and I’d like to see more events more toward session evaluations through that same interface. Do we really need to be killing trees for written speaker evaluation forms, not to mention the environmental impact of hundreds of golf pencils. I also believe QR codes have huge potential at events, and SXSW put them on every name tag this year. Alas, until standards are adopted and the software is built in to smartphones, we won’t see widespread adoption. But, it will happen by 2012 for certain. 6. Propagate Create your own media during the event. Via Ustream (and its amazing iphone app) you can stream live video of your event for free. Why wouldn’t you? Set up an official Flickr gallery for the event, and encourage attendees to take photos and upload them. Give prizes for Photo of the Day. Make a daily post-show podcast, interviewing speakers, sponsors, and attendees. Or, atomize that audio even more, and create tweets with sound using Twaud.io 7. Aggregate Take the conference content and spread it as widely as possible. Your goal is to get the doubters that didn’t come this year to view that content and decide to go the next year. Take every conference presentation, and instead of just putting them on your Web site or emailing links to attendees, release them on SlideShare (one per day for maximum impact) Provide Twitter transcripts to attendees, and also post it to your various event pages. Backupify has a super cool new, free service called Session Tweets where you can automatically make a PDF of all tweets using your event hashtag. Reward good content. MarketingProfs’ Ann Handley staged a contest last year for their B2B Forum where attendees that created blog posts, video posts, photo galleries, etc and submitted them to the MarketingProfs blog were entered to win a prize – a free registration to next year’s event. Why couldn’t you do that? Why can’t you do all of this? Comments
Tags: Conference, conferences, event, events, Facebook, flickr, marketing, online marketing, photo, search engine, Twitter
Posted March 25, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click Examples of a real-dollar Return on Investment (ROI) from social media marketing programs are rare. Unfortunately for most ecommerce teams, having hundreds of thousands of fans often doesn’t translate into revenue. For your CEO and CFO to take social media campaigns seriously, you need to be able to demonstrate a direct measurable impact that either reduces costs (say in reduced customer service heads) or increases sales. At the moment, most social campaigns are doing neither. Both Dell and Sony have both stated that they have generated real sales from social media program, but these are definitely exceptions. But the majority of marketers don’t even measure ROI at a simple level let alone try and attribute sales. It’s not that there aren’t any tools to do so, or that there isn’t a formula for calculating ROI; it’s just that links to actual sales from social media programs are often tenuous. And where you have tenuous links, then ROI becomes very subjective and only as good as the assumptions that go into the formula. In my experience, CFOs don’t like subjective! There are lots of tools becoming available to help you measure sentiment, comments and click through, but all of these are essentially measuring influence, not measuring what really counts. So perhaps the bigger question should be, “How do we turn fans into paying customers?” Social media marketing is still a long way from reliably generating revenue. Generally these programs most often start with a ‘Broadcast’ stage where the approach is to use blogs and social pages to recruit fans and push a corporate message. The goal here is most often to build large follower bases and communicate with customers and prospects, and educate them about your products and services. Some sites are delivering service as customers seek to get specific answers, to connect with the brand and get service, or just be heard and share their thoughts and experiences. Many brands struggle to deal with this stream, especially in the B2C space where the stream can potentially become an overwhelming torrent. More often than not this demands dedicated headcount, and your CFO may well be asking where the savings or increased sales are. This is where many brands are now: Their social media marketing has established a good fan following, but it’s costing more than they expected to service the requests and moderate the community. There are few attributable sales that can be put against all this effort. Linking Ecommerce and Social Media To convert fans into paying customers though requires more. In fact, it needs integration between ecommerce sites and social media sites so that the data can be linked and fans identified while on the ecommerce site. While your sites are disconnected, all your fans are anonymous; you have no idea whether they are a fan or not, so you can’t market to them in a relevant way. This type of integration is deeper than the commonly seen ‘Friend us on Facebook’ or ‘Follow us on Twitter’ hyperlinks which you see on many ecommerce sites. What’s needed is to allow customers to log in to their social network accounts on your ecommerce site. Over time this will become commonplace and will surpass many registration processes. When this happens, you can then associate browsing behavior, purchases and abandoned shopping carts with the individual fan. You May Ask ‘Why Would a Fan Sign in on my Site?’ The answer is simple. The number one reason why consumers friend a brand on a social network is to receive special offers and promotions. So by putting up a simple logo offering promotions via social networks, you’re giving customers a reason to share with you. Once they are identified, then a whole spectrum of online marketing campaigns become possible for the first time. For example, you might choose to follow up abandoned shopping carts using their social network. Or you might want to run member-get-member promotions to encourage your customers to encourage their friends to buy. This is where the CEO and CFO will start getting interested: Now your campaigns can directly drive sales.
Tags: assumptions, data, ecommerce, Friends, investment, Media, media campaigns, media marketing, online marketing, Review and Story, Social, Social Media, thoughts
Posted March 8, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click At SES Chicago last year, Yahoo VP of Consumer Products, Larry Cornett suggested that blended search results bring businesses a broader range of SEO opportunities, a chance to take control of their brand, and a potential increase in qualified clicks. While these blended results can tend to divert users away from organic listings, as SEO Dave Naylor pointed out at that same conference, Cornett does have a point. Blended search results offer ways to get to the front page of search results beyond just the highly more competitive organic rankings. Sites have opportunities to show up for: – real-time results – news results – image results – video results – shopping results – local results (customers don’t even need to go to your site in some cases) At the recent Online Marketing Summit in San Diego, WebProNews spoke with Conductor CEO Seth Besmertnik, who says companies should still build a foundation in organic rankings before trying to conquer other areas: That said you can break these different elements of blended results down one by one, and look at ways to have your site perform well in each particular one. Here are tips for image search optimization , for example. Here are some for video . Here are some for real-time search . Here are some for news search . Back to Cornett’s point about qualified clicks – focus on what makes the most sense for your site. Is focusing on real-time search worth your time? With Google, at least, even if you show up here, your presence will quickly give way to the next in line, and you will be off the page momentarily (although there still may be times when it makes sense to be seen here). If you don’t have quality video content, video search optimization is not bound to be a very practical use of you time. However, if you do have some good stuff, perhaps you should be heavily focused in this area. I think you get the point. Of course there are plenty of other factors of today’s search results page that drive users away from the “ten blue links” of organic results. It’s not just the blended search elements discussed above. You’ve also got search suggestions, related search links, location, mobile use, paid listings, search options, and various other elements of the user experience that compete for user attention. This is one reason why the lines between search marketing and other types of marketing continue to blur (consider that users of Google or
Tags: conductor, Dave Naylor, Larry Cornett, makes-the-most, online marketing, results news, search optimization, Seth, time, user, video results, yahoo