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Digital Marketing strategy

Top 10 social media sites that will help your business in a big way

Many businesses just shy away from making their presence felt online. The reasons can be myriad, but new-age businesses need to be nimble and agile to capture new customers. With the help of social networking sites, any business can promote their services and products with ease and greater return on investments. Digital marketing revolution has begun and we all are in the digital ship sailing through the information tsunami.

Take any social networking site today, the plethora of content that we see is phenomenal. In this age of digital revolution, businesses need to be present everywhere – sort of omnipresence. But it is truly not possible to be present everywhere. All you need to do is pick and choose the social media sites that will make you a hit over time.

Look at these statistics – Facebook has over 1.2 daily active users all across the world, Twitter has over 313 million active users and LinkedIn over 450 million users. Come to think of it – if you making your present felt only on Facebook, for example, you will be promoting your product or service to the 1.2 billion people – which is almost the size of India’s population.

Let’s look at the top 10 social networking sites that you ought to be present.

Facebook
Youtube
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest
Google Plus+
Tumblr
Instagram
Reddit
VK

And here are some big numbers that will probably convince you.

If you are not tapping at least 6 out of 10, then your business is at peril.

Advertising

The Value of Paid Advertising

It was the peak time when we noticed the increase in number of project proposals our company was receiving. We analysed all our tasks performed that lead us to such success. 60% of our project proposals were from various Paid Media solutions. By then we started using Google Adwords, Facebook Ads and local directories. Campaign analysis has proved us that it is worth investing for the Paid Media. Paid media is one such medium, that may help us reach to larger volume of audience. I noted my observation this time. Unlike the organic campaign, it eased us to analyse every prospect’s behaviour, every campaign activity. The best part is that we were able to execute multiple split tests.

So, here is the glimpse of how Paid Marketing actually benefit our team!

Be it Pay per click for Ad Words or the Facebook ads, declination in Facebook, the new Instagram algorithm, real-time nature of Twitter have engaged brands to invest in the paid media, to amplify content to right audience, who actually are seeking right information at right time.

When it comes to the organic-unpaid marketing, it retains its value and result only when it reaches to the audience in its reach. Just reaching the minimal of 2 to 3% of the followers, has showed the minimal impact. It doesn’t create the brand’s effectiveness.

By utilising high scale of targeting accuracy and analytical calibre, every social media platform has built features that deliver against their business objectives. Paid marketing activities add the supporting value to the authorised media content to drive campaign results for enhanced reach.

Benefits of Paid Media Activity:

Optimised: The advertiser can set the target audience within specific segments, complete adjustments over the ad format, messaging strategy and also set frequency capping for his messages being delivered.
Scale: Paid marketing enables marketers to reach higher number of users who will re-visit site or serve the purpose of campaign.
High-level targeting: Retaining the engaged customers when luring the new fans for the business. Maintain the business consistency, High targeting capabilities to attain accurate audience to re-utilise their customer data to create lookalike audiences. For the product based-companies, third party data companies enable advertisers target users in segment of offline- buyers.
Bidding:Customised bid types to augment towards the variety of campaign objectives.
Optimisation: The optimisation of the paid media helps to gain a specific goal along with the reach , either to the social engagement or conversion.
Tracking: The pixel tracking capabilities is unique for every type of marketing, be it unpaid or paid marketing. The best thing about tracking is that, two or more tracking pixels can be embedded to single paid marketing campaign.
Analytics : After every marketing campaign, analytics not only help our paid marketing campaign tracking, but also deliver the efficiency to choose the best performing Paid Marketing to set up our strategy.

So though it is important to implement and nurture the site with organic search, it is equally important to opt in for the Paid Media Marketing options. Paid marketing options like Google Adwords, PPC are the ones to be utilised with the focus factor to gain more visibility online. Adhering to avoid the black-hat Paid marketing techniques is an added advantage.

PAID MARKETING IS COST EFFECTIVE!

Yes, until you invest in your business in a smart way, you will not be convinced with my words!
So, how do you invest in a cost effective manner? Here are the few highlighting points that can step in now and see the change!

Always make note of every detail you append within the campaigns.
Nourish the lists you build.
Automate to build, align and engage your email lists.
Automate your audience engagement workflow.
Adapt using the Google Adwords to its fullest, i.e integrating the offline email lists and workflows with online lists built.

Hope you enjoyed understanding my experience overview with Paid Marketing! Learn more about Paid Marketing and its elements here.

Digital Marketing strategy

Leveraging the resources of your business

Limited resources is what the startups have at sprouting stage. So, there is a particular stage that team consists only of Founders. Belittle, they do not tend to opt paid promotions. If the start up is all about the product, it’s necessary for the modern age start-ups to go ahead and also produce quality content about the product along with the ways to market it.

When it comes to services, the start ups need to have the fundamental group of audience who would take up their services. The alternative is to provide its target customers with some unique services, which no other might provide.
It is equally important to have diverse segment of people handling and managing complete business the main elements as Planning, Operations, Technology and marketing.
So, it is the need of the hour to analyse how much does each of the element contribute towards the business success?

United we stand, Divided we fall

So, how does this apply to the start ups?
When each of the element is executed, start up is making progress in the integrated aspects.

PLANNING

It is very much important for a start up to plan, prepare a strategy, analyse the strategy and also execute the plan. Planning is something which we do for a short term and long term basis. Every segment of the start up needs to give their inputs for the planning in the initial stages.
Brainstorming the ideas during pre- planning would help to collect all the ideas.
Scheduling the ideas and collected plans during Planning phase helps the start ups to grow in the right direction.
When the plan is ready, it is important to first analyse before expelling it to the entire team.

OPERATIONS

Operations play vital role. These help the planning be sorted and are purposefully intended to manage the plan of action. These operations also need to adopt various techniques as testing which type of execution helps the best in its operations. Operations needs to inculcate the marketing strategies too!

TECHNOLOGY

Technology team is spread-over the entire start up. These are supposed to come up with new ways of how the operations, promotions and marketing are carried off. Technology is to cater its orientation to the best use of new featured tools about how better and cost effective ways can be incorporated for the improving the execution pace.

MARKETING

Here is where the team represents the start up. Marketing team needs to receive support from the Planning, Operations and Technology team to serve their purpose better. and then Boom! Branding starts off!

The key of success to pace up your propeller Planning by diversifying the time allotted for each of the above segment to enhance the execution. Every team with its respective execution is what is going to update the start up with successful step ups.

Hope you enjoyed our article, if so, do comment below your inputs.

Software Reviews

Video Wave Pro Review & Product Tour

video wave Video marketing is hot and there are even statistics that say, that within the next 1-2 years, more than 60% of traffic will come from videos. So if you’re not doing any kind of video marketing yourself, then you really should think about that.

Video Wave claims to be the one tool which lets you easily create stunning videos and get them ranked on YouTube as well as Google within a short time and with just a few clicks! But can they really deliver on their claim or is it just another big hyped up marketing slang they use to get your money? Keep on reading to get all the facts and find out the truth.

Blog Articles

Increasing GDP Through Gender Parity

When it comes to arguments in support of workplace gender equality, proponents typically describe the issues in terms of fundamental fairness. However, there is another approach currently afoot that is centered more around economic common sense.

The McKinsey Global Institute has released a report suggesting that the GDP of the United States could grow by an additional $2.1 trillion in just 20 years’ time if individual states made efforts to boost the female rate of workforce participation, raise their number of work hours and encourage them to enter employment sectors with greater productivity. The earning potential of American women has long been hampered by their traditional performance of nearly twice the amount of unpaid care taking than men, such as child rearing, housekeeping and more.

The assessment from McKinsey argues that states need to be emulating the progress on such issues that has been achieved by states including New York, Texas and North Carolina if the nation’s true potential is to be fully tapped.

Addressing the gulf in these areas could grow U.S. GDP by at least 5% in all states, with half of the country likely able to grow by no less than 10%, states the report. Of course, to achieve these goals, the country’s leadership must take steps to pump approximately $475 billion into the economy for the creation of over 6 million jobs and to pay for the child care services necessary to allow for the GDP-boosting workforce participation of women.

When analyzed in comparison with other nations, the United States is characterized by relatively low to moderate levels of overall gender disparity in terms of actual workforce presence, the number of women in professional roles and their degree of educational attainment. However, the United States ranks much higher on the inequality scale for things such as the number of women in leadership roles, the amount of unpaid care taking they do and their degree of political representation. The rates of teen pregnancy, single parenthood and other factors have also contributed to these disparities, the study reveals.

The primary author of the McKinsey study emphasizes that it will remain impossible to harness the $2 trillion potential, provided these societal gulfs are not directly addressed.

Issues of gender inequality have taken center stage in the current presidential race. Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton has argued that the economic well-being of American families depends on eliminating pay disparities based on gender, as have key members of the Obama administration.

Blog Articles, Advertising

Trade Show Displays

Many people know what trade show displays are when they see them, but they could not tell you much about them. There are a rather large variety of make and models for trade show displays. It all just depends on the type of display that you are looking for or the area that you will be advertising. There are several things to consider when purchasing trade show displays such as size, weight, cost, and mobility. Below is a list of some of the most popular forms of trade show displays.

Banner-up

The banner up is probably one of the most common trade show displays. It is unit with an average size of 3’ x 7’ that displays generally a vinyl banner. The nice thing about the banner-up display is that the poles easily pull out of the back of the display and the banner conveniently rolls up into the unit. The poles and unit can fit easily into a carrying bag that makes the transportation of the unit rather simple.

Adding A Photo Activation

If you’ve got the budget, you’ve always got the chance to hire a third party to build you a custom photo booth activation. Doing things this way can help take some of the work off your hands and give your trade show visitors something they’ll remember. If you haven’t got the time or ability to do something yourself, hiring an expert to handle everything is a great choice.

8’ POP-Up Display

trade show displays The 8’ pop-up display is more common for people that will not be supplied cubicles or specialized areas for their company. The display often can come with lights, and the carrying unit can convert into a podium. This is an excellent unit for someone that may have a large variety of information that they need to cover, will need to change information often, or would like to have a transportable back-drop for when they give their presentations.

Xpand Pop-up Displays

This are extremely cost effective displays that are extremely easy to setup. They come in a variety of sizes, but the setup consists of basically unfolding the display and giving it a little shake. The units a rather in expensive because they are made out board versus vinyl, so this is a great display option for a company that may need a large quantity of displays.

Trade show displays are a great way to extend the visibility of your company so that individuals attending a trade show can easily find your company. It is also a great way to be able to provide a decent amount of information that people can see as they are approaching. There are quite a large variety of displays, so it should be easy to find a display that fits your trade show needs rather easily. Just keep in mind that you have a limited amount of space available to you so do not order a display that will not fit in your area.

ThinkBalm Reports

What is an advertisement plan (and its contents)?

Question by windleox: What is an advertisement plan (and its contents)?

I am asked to become an advertisement plan expert for my marketing class. That is I have to know what an advertisement plan is and what contents are in the plan.

I wouldn’t mind looking for reference in my school library, but I have no idea what keywords I should look for.

Any helps would be appreciated. Thank you.

Best answer:

Answer by ALASKA F

First you have to identify your market clientele Men/women/animals????
Then their demographics where they are what they do.
Target the group .Age, sex, preference, single married,……….
How do you reach them?
Sunbathers tow a banner on the beach……
Pilots at airport or flying magi zens……
scuba divers dive shops or magi zines…..
you get the picture
about 15% of your gross income should go back in to advertisement.
Be very careful where you spend you advertising dollar,
Possibly have a article written about your service in the trade publication for trade of the product, this only cost a small amount compared to the return,
Do some thing out-landesh to get attention, climb a tall building with your web site written on your back. hide out behind new paper reporters with your web site in the background.
Think if you were the one who wanted the product, where would you go to find it.
good luck there are a lot of people out there.

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!

SEO

Stop Obsessing Over SEO

There’s a big problem with the way some individuals are obsessed with SEO. They are addicted to checking stats, like 10 times a day. They slave for hours over keyword minutia, wanting more clicks and search engine hits.

All they can think about is their next “fix.” How many backlinks do I have? What PageRank do I have now? Are these links nofollowed? Should I target more keywords?

Newsflash… SEO is the NOT the “holy grail” of traffic anymore.

It was until 2006. Search engines were pretty much all there was. If you were looking for something, you either searched for it, emailed some friends, or went to the store and looked.

Since 2006 I’ve noticed a shift in my traffic. It’s drifted away from SEO and search, to social media and syndication services.

I’m talking MASSIVE traffic from the YouTubes, iTunes, Twitters, PRWebs and social bookmarking services of the world. One podcast I did snagged over 100,000 downloads, a PDF newsletter 50,000.

Plus, I get all sorts of traffic from written content in articles, posts, newsletters, whitepapers, ebooks and blog comments. In fact, one single comment on a tech blog drove over 400 visitors to my site in the first hour.

My advice to those individuals obsessed with SEO? Get your head out of your stats. SEO has limited clicks, or “inventory” available.

For example, take a commercial keyword that has 20,000 searches per month. Divide that by a “normal” 1.5% conversion and that’s 300 potential sales for the month. Now split those sales over the top 10 search results and all the paid ads.

If you’re lucky, you might snag a couple of those sales. Sad huh?

The solution? Go where the people hang out. That’s the key to getting more traffic.

Even if you rank for dozens of keywords, here’s a reality check. Unless you own the search engine, you don’t OWN those search results. All it takes is one small change to the search engine algo and… Blammo!

You got nothing. You’re knocked out of the top 10 results.

Months of SEO work down the tube. You could be out of business overnight. I’ve seen it happen to hundreds of people. Especially affiliate marketers. Right or wrong, that’s how it is.

The solution? Be social.

Don’t wait for people to come to you. Go where they hang out.

Position yourself as the leader in your niche, or product category. Talk with people. Start participating in the conversations like I teach in my Goobert Social Media Marketing Method.

A good case in point is Gary Vaynerchuk, with his Wine Library TV and amazing book called Crush It. (Which I’ve listened to three times and highly recommend).

Gary didn’t rely on search engines at all. He attributes his rapid growth and success to the freely available social media tools, which didn’t even exist two years ago.

A more subtle everyday example is my friend… He’s looking for an iPhone dock with speakers. Did he search? No.

He Tweeted. He got got several replies. Took the recommendations. Read the product reviews on Apple and Amazon. And made the purchase decision. All without resorting to a search engine.

The evidence is clear. Since 2006, most people turn to their social networks, videos, podcasts and product reviews for advice. Especially for advice on purchase decisions.

So if you have any kind or product or service you’re promoting, you’ve got to get a Twitter account and subscribe to Google Alerts. Monitor the conversations about your websites and brands.

Jump into those conversations when it makes sense to do so. It’s your chance to influence a purchase decision before they resort to a search engine.

Take a camera and throw together some quick three minute videos for Youtube. Especially if your product, or service is visually oriented, or if it’s a process that you can show people.

Take people on a virtual tour with the camera. Show the features and benefits. Let the videos help you sell everything from washing machines to GPS units.

If you sell software, make screen capture videos with Camtasia or Screenflow. Show them how easy your product is to use, and the benefits of using it.

You could do a telephone interview with an expert and have it recorded. Make it into an MP3 and post it into iTunes for instant traffic.

Maybe set up a UStream channel and broadcast yourself live. Everyone from musicians to hair salons are jumping on this.

Video, audio, screencasts, slidecasts, blogging, tweeting, facebooking… it’s all exploding in popularity. It only makes sense to be part of the mediums where people hang out.

So please…. please… stop obsessing over SEO and your search engine rankings. Stop relying so heavily on search results for traffic.

Start obsessing over where the people are. What they’re doing online. And where they’re going next. Try to find them earlier in the decision making process, by getting there first.

Try creating videos, ustreams, podcasts, slide shows, screencasts, blogs, tweets, and commenting on other people’s blogs. That’s where the people hang out and spend the most time online.

Position yourself as the leader in your niche. You know your topic better than anyone… or at least you should be trying to.
Show them by participating and producing quality content, that you’re the right person to lead them.
By syndicating your content, you’ll get more qualified traffic than you ever could with the “cold call” of search results.
People will find you from 100 places, not just one or two search engines. So you’ll sleep better at night because you’re not obsessing over SEO.
You’ll have a lot more fun making videos, than begging people to link to you.
You’ll convert double, or maybe even triple the clicks into sales, because of your leadership and influence.

So ease up on the SEO and get out your video camera instead. Syndicate that video in several media channels and you’ll get all the traffic you need.

ThinkBalm Reports

How to Make Money with Videos

How to hit the YouTube home page and earn money from your viral videos.

I was watching a network news journalist interview a teenage girl and her family. Her silly music video generated over 250,000 dollars in the first couple of months alone.

Now her family is quarter million dollars richer! Not bad for an average teenager, with an average voice, and less than stellar video production.

How did she do it? With ads in the video.

As soon as you hit about 1,000 views, Google will ask permission to advertise on your video. When you login to your account you’ll see, “Apply for partnership to take advantage of your popular video.”

If you can make it into the “Featured” or “Trends” section, you’ve hit the YouTube jet stream. The highly coveted home page, in front of millions of people.

To get there takes a mighty viral push. You’ll need to wrangle the support of all your social networks, Facebook and Twitter followers. Here’s how…

SEO for your YouTube video depends on four things:

– How many views you get
– How many thumbs up you get
– How many comments you get
– How quickly you get all the above

Keep in mind the following tips…

A view counts if it’s over 5 seconds long. Make the opening seconds surprise and amaze.

Tell them in the text under the video, to click on the thumbs up icon, aka the “Like” button. Don’t assume they know what to do.

Make an emotional appeal to the viewer. Ask them to leave a quick comment. Even if its just a single sentence. Every little bit helps.

Notes on Viral…

Most viral videos are funny, amazing, surprising or entertaining. Without one or more of these, your video will sputter on the way to the jet stream.

How to Optimize Your YouTube Channel…

– Put your most important keywords in the video title
– Repeat the keywords in the description and tags
– Don’t use a fancy design or border around the video
– Keep the page design simple, with a white background
– Make sure the video preference is set to auto play
– Put a clickable links in video’s description (Facebook, Twitter)

Important Notes from TubeMogul.com
(The video syndication dudes.)

TubeMogul’s data shows that video has a short shelf life. They did a case study of 10,000 videos that had at least 1,000 views. The biggest traffic spike came at three days.

They suggest that you put out a lot of videos, because they peak early. The maximum views come when you do a series of short videos and upload a new one every few days. Thursday afternoon and Sunday evenings are peak viewing times.

They also suggest that you, “Put the name of your brand in the video title, because some services list only the title. It’s important to be consistent and put out topically related videos, as it increases your overall rankings in Google.”

Additional Promotion

In addition to doing the SEO for YouTube, ask your viewers to bookmark you on Delicious. If you make it to their “What’s Hot” home page, you can get a boost of extra momentum.

Be sure to monitor your keywords using Google Alerts and the Twitter home page. (AKA the Goobert method.) Participate in every discussion about you and your brand. Link to the video everywhere you comment.

Be voracious thank you note writers. Jot a note every time someone mentions you. Even if its just a couple of words to say thanks. It goes a long way.

Remember what TubeMogul said, the biggest spike comes at the three day mark. So upload that video and spend the next three days promoting it like crazy, using the strategies I’ve outlined above.

Who knows, maybe your video will hit the jet stream and go viral. Say yes to Google advertising and one silly video could generate all the coin you need for a lifetime. It happens to others. It could happen to you.

So be sure to take your video camera along and keep shooting, because you never know when something funny, amazing, surprising or entertaining will happen near you.

ThinkBalm Reports

The Biggest Marketing Mistake

Are you permission marketing? In other words, are you sending email to people who’ve asked to receive it? There are still a few of you – you know who you are – that don’t get signups from people visiting your site.

At the very least, I hope the following numbers inspire you. The average reader is worth four dollars per year, as long as they stay subscribed. Some markets are worth more, others less. This is the average.

So if you built a readership of 10,000, that’s worth an extra 40,000 dollars per year. That’s over and above any website revenues. Does that inspire you?

Some complain permission marketing is hard to learn.

I disagree.

Permission marketing is easier than ever. It’s not like the old days when you had to figure it out for yourself. Now there’s all sorts of video tutorials and ‘how-to’ guides online.

Some complain that they don’t like writing. Usually it’s a small minority of folks, in niches they know nothing about. To them writing seems like a job.

You know what? If you don’t like what you’re doing… quit and get out. Time is the one thing in life you cannot get back. Life is too short to be trading it, for something you don’t enjoy doing.

On the other hand…

If you love what you do, you never get talker’s block. So why on earth would you get writer’s block?

If you don’t like to write, jot down a few notes, then open a video camera and talk.

What if you’re camera shy? There are alternatives.

You can report on what’s happened and just summarize what’s already been written. You could source a Youtube video of the week, or the day. Maybe source a quote of the day, a recipe of the day, or even a product recall of the day.

You can subscribe to the blogs and newsletters in your niche. This is especially important for affiliate marketers, because most major manufacturers have newsletters. You can know ahead of time, about new product releases, and have your advertising ready to go, the minute they hit the stores.

You could do interviews with experts and have them transcribed through castingwords.com. (That’s how they maintain their position as leaders and experts. They make themselves available for interviews and other media coverage.)

You can subscribe to Google Alerts and Twitter feeds, (AKA the Goobert conversational marketing method.) Then choose the best content you’ve read and aggregate it back out. You can paraphrase the mood, or comments, interject your own opinion, and fire it back out into the blogosphere.

As a last resort you can invite, or use, guest articles and posts. Or if you really must, outsource your writing to freelance talent on elance.com or odesk.com.

So in the end, it doesn’t matter what you send. The important thing is to get started.

And when you’re ready to start permission email marketing, join me through AWeber, because that way, if you ever need help, I can give you a hand. I’ve been using them to send this newsletter for over 11 years.

If you’re not permission marketing. You’re eating the appetizer, but leaving the meal on the table. This is the biggest mistake marketers make.

Promise yourself – starting tomorrow – that you’ll make permission marketing a priority. Make it commitment. Write it on a sticky note and paste it on your monitor right now. Do it!

And no matter what the economy decides to do, next year will be your personal best.

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