Posts Tagged ‘services’
Monitoring online buzz is like reverse market research. Instead of asking people what they think in a survey or focus group, you read what they’re saying online in blogs, article comments, posts made to forums and places like Twitter and Facebook. It’s eavesdropping on public conversations.
In the old days there were clipping services. Now there are amazing tools that gather and capture the relevant information you want about your company, your brands, your competitors and even individual people. At any given moment there are millions of conversations happening online. They may be brief, but they’re happening nevertheless. Tuning in to this ongoing dialog and focusing on conversations specifically about your business or brand can offer a wealth of insight into your customers’ mindsets.
Why monitoring social media is important
1. Lead generation. More marketers are recognizing that effective lead generation isn’t about firing out the most messages. It’s about getting the right message to the right prospect at the right time, which may be after that person has already engaged in some type of social media encounter with your brand and your customers.
2. Reputation management. Keeping your finger on the pulse of what customers are saying, especially as it relates to issues, frustrations, and complaints, allows you to quickly and authentically resolve their concerns.
3. Identifying brand fans and vocal customer advocates who spread positive word-of-mouth so you can nurture these free “sales reps.”
How to monitor social media marketing
There are a number of companies that offer tools and services to make it easy to monitor what people online are saying about your brand and your competitors. Some of these tools are free, others you pay a nominal fee for. A complete list of social media monitoring tools may be found by performing a search on the keywords “social media monitoring tools.” Tweetdeck and Hubspot are two of the more popular tools available.
These social media monitoring tools are very helpful because they will save you a great deal of time and your email inbox won’t be clogged with all sorts of tweets, updates, and alerts. Instead, you’ll have a dashboard to monitor what people are saying about what matters to you most. That may be your company, your own name, your executives, your competitors, your industry or specific brand names for products or services.
Cautions about Social Media Monitoring
Social media marketing shouldn’t replace market research. Why? Because in general the people who take the time to express an opinion about a business or brand via social media are generally on one extreme or the other: they either love something enough to talk about it, or dislike it enough to complain. It’s helpful to monitor brand popularity (or lack thereof), but social media monitoring tools/services are not very helpful for understanding customer satisfaction, new product acceptance, and test marketing. They should complement, not replace more traditional market research.
Do you have your own business? Is it listed online? Say goodbye to the days of the yellow pages, online business directories are the method that most consumers and customers go to today for finding the local business that they are looking for. Whether you are looking for local automotive industries, restaurants, clothing outlet store, retail shops, grocery stores, bars, or any other type of business, internet business listings are the preferred method of the public.
One thing you might have noticed is that searching for a business online is much easier than searching for a business in the yellow pages or calling a phone directory service. The reason that this is, is because the internet is updated every day. Phone book and phone directories are only updated every few months, so if a business moves, goes out of business, or a new business opens up, the phone book directory will not be updated. Plus, you can find more than just the address of a business if you look for it online. An internet search of a business will provide the address, a phone number, a website, a physical map, links other locations, competitive businesses, and even videos.
Videos are search tools that are being used for a search engine more and more each day. YouTube.com is officially the second highest rated search engine, just under Google. With a video, your business becomes more visible on the internet, and allows customers an in-depth view of your business with a simple interactive video.
So one thing you may have noticed is that even though a business may be listed online, it might not come up in the search results on Google as the first item, or even on the first page. Just because you have a business listing online doesn’t mean that Google will automatically push it to the top of the search results.
The action of getting a website to climb the ranks of Google search results is called S.E.O., or Search Engine Optimization. Search engine optimization entails detailing your website and other web properties around it to ensure that Google puts it at the top of the search results listed under the keywords you anticipate that your customers will search for when they are looking for a business like yours. This entails proper meta-tagging, daily unique content, the website domain name, blogs, backlinks and other sources to give your site proper search engine optimization.
But the most import part of have your company listed on local business search is to make sales. With website or listing on the internet, your business can make sales in the store or on the web. Customers can easily find where you are located at if they want to come by your physical store, and if you sell products or services online a customer can go directly to your website and purchase your products. With an online store that is listed in a local business search, your business can sell products 24 hours a day and seven days a week. You will have a virtual storefront that never closes.
A wise man once said “Marketing = Education”. What he meant by that is that you need to use you marketing to educate your prospects. But what do you need to educate your prospects on? You need to educate your prospects on the solution your services provide, your expertise and the value of your services.
Although you can educate your audience through teleseminars, article marketing or your blog, my personal favorite is workshops and seminars. You can invite your prospects to an inexpensive 1 hour or ½ day workshop and teach them about your area of expertise. This does several things:
– It establishes your credibility, because when you are in front of the room, you are instantly perceived to be the undisputed expert. Whether you think you are or not, you are the expert in the eyes of your audience.
– It educates your audience on the solution that your product or services provide. Remember, you never sell just a service, you sell a solution to the problem your audience has. Focus on the problem and educate your audience on how your services provide the solution.
– Clients buy from people they know, like and trust. When you are up on stage, your audience obviously knows you. When you tell your story and share some vulnerability, people will like you. Since you demonstrate your expertise by teaching your audience, you are getting your audience to trust you. So having a workshop is the ideal vehicle to get people to buy from you.
– If people have objections to buying from you, that generally means that they do not have all the information yet. Your workshop should be able to give them all the information they need to make a decision one way or another. Not everyone is a good fit for you, but they will know after your workshop.
– Your workshop establishes the value of your services. Through your success stories and your content, you can show the value of what you do. You can demonstrate through examples the money clients made or saved my using your services. That is a powerful tool and cannot be underestimated.
So take the plunge and start teaching. You will not only educate your audience, you will also market yourself and your services. You will be surprised at the new clients you will attract and better yet, the increase in your bottom line.
The problem with free advertisements along with other free online marketing and advertising channels is that they might give the unsuitable impact to your company. Several free ads come off as inexpensive and second-rate, phrases you actually wouldn’t like to link to your company. It’s nice to save cash with guerrilla marketing techniques, however, you shouldn’t sacrifice the image and credibility of your business along the way. Good guerrilla marketing such as a rewards-based customer referral program helps improve your business organically and project a professional image.
Instead, below are a few popular web marketing strategies, which you could use instead. Link exchanges could be terrific, particularly when your advertising budget is restricted or nonexistent. Find merchants that sell supplementary items, and offer to trade text links or ads with them. In case you are just starting out and your site doesn’t get much traffic, you may not get a one-to-one trade; be prepared to make concessions, at least until you have a track record and traffic to indicate. Having said that, most companies is not going to ignore the opportunity for more exposure, so you will likely find a few happy to exchange links on you.
Newsletter advertising is a great way to reach select groups of consumers. For instance, when you sell health products, you may advertise in a newsletter that gives health tips and advice. Because newsletter advertising is specific, it is usually really expensive. If your budget is tight, you can start your own newsletter campaign. Budgeted advertising, like Google AdWords, allows you to get a set of keywords, set a limit on how much you would like to spend, and have your ad display until the limit is attained. It is a specifically useful way to track your campaign success, and has been a boon to small businesses proprietors.
When you have graduated from these techniques, or if your budget allows it, try approaching popular news services, Web-based email providers, and other sites that reach a big segment of the population. While this can prove extremely expensive, in return, you have the potential of reaching countless new clients. No matter what method you may take, provide serious thought to your “creative” the actual ad itself. Be it just a text link, or whether it’s an extensive banner-ad campaign, the creative can make or break your advertising effort. Try several versions, track them, and see, those that perform best.
Local Business Advertising is effective however, you need to be wary of sites offering to provide a free link in the interest of increasing your search engine rank. Search engines caught on to these so-called link farms a long time ago and a link there is more likely to hurt your ranking than improve it. In fact, it could even get you banned from search engines altogether (something called ‘being in the sandbox’). There’s nothing ever really free. Whatever looks free eventually ends up costing you in the long run.
The great depression of the 1930s is still a powerful memory in the minds of many people. As a result, the present economic situation scared the majority of the people who have directly or indirectly felt the negative effects of the Great Depression. These two episodes are similar to some extent, but we have to admit that there are some aspects that haven’t been present during the economic downturn of the 20th Century. Thus, it is important that we only adopt those measures from the past that might work for the current situation.
One important factor that contributed to the re-balance of the economic situation back in the 30s was the fact that people were willing to change their lifestyles in order to save money and cover their debts. This is a good example that we can follow these days as the current economic recession was determined primarily by the numerous credits that have been registered. If you want to purchase something, you better wait until you raise all the money you need; don’t get a credit unless it is really necessary.
The second measure that helped in the 1930s was the fact that people oriented themselves towards do-it-yourself activities. Nowadays, we have forgotten how inspiring and satisfying it is to create our own food, clothes or even furniture, so there is a lot of money that people waste on products and services that they can very well do themselves. Unleash your hidden talents and you’ll see that you will be able to produce products that are just as good as the ones on the market, yet much more affordable and resistant.
Being a wary consumer will enable you to use less money on food and other commodities. As a matter of fact, during the Great Depression people would reuse materials and objects to create new items. Thus, you should not throw your old clothes or your electrical devices on the window; take the functioning parts and create new objects instead.
Finally, the economic recession is a period of investments, even though this may seem strange to you. As experts have noticed during previous economic downfalls, it is very convenient to invest your money in tangible products that are very likely to become more expensive after the recession. Such is the case of the gold and the oil market which are likely to register an amazing increase in the years to come.