A great article from one of our favorite bloggers.

1) You don’t have the basics right. Your business model is non-existent. (Call Joe). You don’t have a tested product. You don’t have a goal. Your website hasn’t been updated since 2002. Social media marketing comes last.

2) Your boss isn’t on board. I’ve seen this happen, and it never ends well.  No matter how much you LOVE social media and think it could turn your business around, it doesn’t matter unless your boss is on board. Even if you are able to get some traction, your boss will pull the plug if he or she wasn’t sold on the idea from the beginning.

3) Your employees aren’t on board. I sat through a wonderful lunch the other day where a boss was ready to make things happen with social media. His manager on the other hand was not. The manager was clearly too busy handling operations, and didn’t think he could handle one more of his boss’  ideas. If you think social media is for your company, make sure your employees see the value first.

4) You want a short term solution. I am sorry guys but no one is going to say “ooh look! a business consultant on twitter. I want to hire you!” Social media is NOT a short term solution. It is, more or less, a lifetime (at least business-wise) commitment.

5) You want to see a direct impact on ROI. Will it impact your ROI? Yes. Will itdirectly impact your ROI? No. The bigger the sale, the more touch points a business needs. This is how must people buy from us: Someone refers them to our website or they find us on (gasp!) a social media site. They sign up for our newsletter. Six months later, they hear me speak somewhere. They continue to follow me on Twitter. Another month goes by. They decide they need their website optimized or their facebook fan page customized or to entirelyoutsource marketing. They call. They are ready to buy. Did social media impact our ROI? Not directly. But, did it create a channel for us to keep in touch until they were ready? Absolutely.

6) You don’t want to build content. Somewhere out there, Newt and Joe are vigorously nodding their heads. Social media is a channel. It is a medium. It is two tin cups with a wire in the middle. It is NOT a substitute for the message. When you mistake the medium for the message, you get inane status updates like “just had a PB&J.” Seriously? Just because you now have a megaphone does NOT mean you no longer have to have something valid to say while using the megaphone.

7) You have a zero budget. Social media marketing is not free. The tools are free, but the tools are no good without a strategy. Just ask B.L. Ochman. If I handed you a hammer, nails, and a few boards – could you build a shelter? Yes? Okay. How long would the shelter last? If it collapses on you, it can cause more harm than good.

You don’t have time. Social media takes time. It doesn’t have to be your personal time, but it does take SOMEBODY’S time. And, it takes quality time.

9) You don’t want to work within a changing landscape. Social media yesterday was blogging. Today it is video. Tomorrow may be location based social networking. If you are truly interested, you have to keep up. Or, you have to assign someone to keep up for you.

10) You don’t believe in giving it away. True story. A couple of months ago, I am sitting in the boardroom of a leading accounting firm. I am explaining the concept of blogging, and the head partner asks me: “Why would I give away what I know?” I explained I wasn’t talking about trade secrets or anything of that sort. But, instead, I was talking about content that would build their expertise as a firm. He scrunched up his brow and said “for FREE?!”  This isn’t a social media problem. This is a mindset challenge.

Article From: @Shama Kabani Marketing Zen.com

Photo Credit: @Vlauria on Flickr

How to Raise Your Value Proposition from the Dead

A flashy red button here, a rotating image there, a little video here…cool, right? It has become easier and easier to fancy-up your home page with little to no effort or expertise. This is not necessarily a good thing. All that fancy footwork merely serves as a distraction, rendering your value proposition DOA and effectively buried; never to be heard from again. Take a look at this simple example from Marketingprofs.com:

Where does your eye go? Most often to the smiling faces rather than the copy, which is the value proposition; that is what you want your visitors to see instead. This is just a “simple” image – imagine the impact if the people were actually moving! Movement and image bells and whistles aren’t the only potential problems. Too much copy and messaging can also kill your value prop. The more you force feed content on your web page, the harder it becomes for the visitor to find what’s most important.

So, if you think your value prop is currently doomed to fail for whatever reason, here are some dos and don’ts to help you resuscitate and invigorate:

• Make your value prop stationary and obvious ¹
• Eliminate extraneous information
• Don’t be afraid of white space¹
• Be brief – ¹0 goals are as bad as none¹
• Use customer language – forget buzzwords and acronyms²
• Make your value proposition clear and precise¹
• Focus on a single benefit³
• Be specific³
• Create a sense of urgency³
• Mitigate buyer’s risk³
• Make it about an outcome, not a process3
• It should elevate you above your competitor

We are increasingly bombarded with information from more and different channels. That makes it even more important to make your value proposition concise, compelling, and to have it stand out. Now, start the New Year out right, go resurrect your value proposition!

Resources

1. Is Your Homepage Overwhelming and Underperforming?
2. Don’t Make These Value-Proposition Mistakes
3. Creating Compelling Value Propositions Can Be Fun

– Article by: Karen Daniels

Direct Mail Marketing and Twitter may have more in common than you think.

If you’ve used Twitter, you know it’s limited to 140 characters. Do you know why? The postcard. As the story goes, the character limit was dreamed up by Friedhelm Hillebrand (father of modern text messaging) who came up with 160 as the “magic number” needed to convey something.1 When the deciding committee looked at Postcards and found most of the messages were around 150 characters – voila – the 160 character limit was born (Twitter keeps those extra 20 characters for usernames). Fascinating, right? So, how can you use the currently oh-so-popular Twitter logic and apply that to your Direct Mail Marketing?

• Think Vacation Postcard, not Marketing Postcard | The day of the forceful “I’m selling you something” marketing is gone to be replaced by relationship-driven marketing. If you don’t care about your customers, they’re not going to care about you. Remember those vacation postcards your friends have sent you over the years? “Hey, wish you were here?”That’s the feeling a Tweet gives you and the feeling you want to replicate with mailers today.
• Keep it Short and Conversational | We are so deluged with information, it is a good idea to squeeze the important aspects of your message into as few words as possible because you’ll have a better chance at getting people to read and respond. The nature of both Twitter and Postcards force you to keep things short and get right to the point. Amen.
• Be Personal – Don’t Automate | Even though there are ways to automate your Twitter responses experts say that it’s best not to do that. 2 The same goes for Postcards. Give your postcard campaigns a chatty personal feeling, use names whenever possible, and create copy that is more like talking to a friend.
• Updates & Invitations | Use postcards to keep your customers updated on events, promos etc. Just like you would with Tweets. For instance, send out a “mark your calendar” postcard for important events. Twitter is a good forum for generating quick invites to your blog or site – so are postcards. Use them to generate a quick phone call or for “driving people to your Web site”3 (or to your Twitter site).
• The Postcard Tweet Me | One of the cool things about Twitter is the “you talk I listen, I talk you listen” thing – you know, a conversation. You can imitate this feeling with direct mail by sending out a mailer with a postcard the customer can return. A conversational, “Hey, what did you think of the red shirt you bought from us? Send in this card and let us know.” Then when they send the card in, respond to them by sending an email or other communication, “Thanks for letting us know how you liked the red shirt” and then invite them to follow you on your blog or Twitter.

Twitter is about people. Make your Postcards and other mailers about the people you are connecting with – not about what you want to tell them.

Resources

Short Is Sweet: Postcards Begat SMS Begat Twitter by MG Siegler

Nine Twitter tips for business by Jason Snell

Five Inexpensive Direct Mail Tools to Generate Sales Leads Fast by Dean Rieck

By: Matthew Orley of Copley, OH

Looking to Print Door Hangers soon? Check out these helpful tips on how to design a door hanger to ensure your promotion goes as smoothly as possible!

1. Hierarchy of Text

Door hangers are not very big, so this means you will not have much room for text. In order to make the most of your copy you need to have a clear hierarchy of text. A big bold headline is often a great way to grab attention, followed by mid-sized text with more details and finally information on your offer, product or service and how they can take advantage of what you are telling them about. Information such as phone numbers should also be relatively large in size.

Also, be sure the font sizes of your hierarchy levels are different enough so that users can clearly make out the most important information first. The size differences will also add contrast allowing people to read the copy of your door hanger quickly and easily.

You can also try adding white space between different blocks of text to make reading even easier. White space is simply open space between two areas making the text and design feel more open. White space is proven to make reading easier and will help hold a viewers attention for longer.

2. Powerful Imagery

Since door hangers are often small, you need powerful imagery to draw in a person’s eye. Once you have grabbed their attention with interesting visuals, they will be more likely to read the text on your door hanger and either save the door hanger or take you up on your “call to action” right away.

Stock photo sites such as iStockPhoto have tons of great high-quality photos available that you can download and include in your door hanger designs. Even if you do not use a photo of say a person or object, you should consider using and eye catching background design or colors. Just make sure your text is readable over the background and if it is not, you can always add a block of color behind the text to make it pop and add contrast.

3. Call to Action

A door hanger is pointless unless you have a clear call to action allowing you can make a return on your investment. Call to actions can vary greatly, but the most common ones are getting people to call a number, send an email, visit a website or take advantage of a sale or coupon of some sort. So make sure the point of your door hanger is clear or people will not know what to do with them.

Even if your door hanger is going to say “thank you” you can still pitch some sort of offer to make sure the customers return again.

4. Proper Door Hanger Template

When you are designing a door hanger it is essential that you use an accurate door hanger template from your printer – correct file size, bleed, trim marks and color profiles! This will help ensure your door hangers come out great when you print.

5. Professional Door Hanger Printing

A great door hanger design is important, but a bad printing job can quickly destroy all your hard work and invested money for your door hanger promotion.

Are you confused about SEO and SEM? There’s a lot to learn and even the terminology can be confusing. Here, we present the basics in terminology and process to help get you started.

Often people will find your website by doing a search on a search engine – such as Google or Firefox. No doubt you’ve done searches yourself by typing a word or words onto the search page and then looking at all those thousands of results. Because there are so many web pages on the Internet the goal is to get your site positioned toward the top of the search results list. So, how do you do this? With SEO and SEM.

SEO Defined

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization – basically the process of improving your website so it’s “friendly” to search engines like Google and Firefox. Ways to improve your SEO includes the flow of your website, your keywords and content, meta-tags,¹ as well as a host of other tactics. 

SEM Defined

Search engine marketing – SEM – is a way of marketing your website through “paid placement” tools such as Pay-per-click (PPC – you pay when someone clicks on your ad) and 
“contextual advertising”² (the search engine shows advertisements that are related to the keywords used in the search).³

1. SEO and SEM Begin with Keywords

The idea is to utilize specific words and phrases that your potential customers would use to find your business or product. Treat each of your website pages as individuals, when it comes to keywords and phrases. Once you’ve selected a few relevant phrases, then you should develop your well written content around those.¹ Here’s a google keyword tool you can use to find keyword ideas.

2. SEO – Html Meta Tags

Html Meta tags include the title tag, description and keywords tags. Your title tag should include one or two of your most relevant keywords or phrases. Your keywords meta tag should list the words or phrases that “best describe the contents of the page. The description meta tag includes a brief one- or two-sentence description of the page.”¹

3. Pay Per Click Basics

Once you’ve developed your keywords into content and put in your meta tags, you can begin with an SEM pay per click account, if it’s in your budget to do so. SEM accounts are organized into three tiers: account, campaign, and ad group. Each campaign has its own budget and   each ad group contains a set of ads that relate to your chosen keywords.

4. SEM and Your Landing Pages

When you write each PPC ad you will want to send the customer who clicks on it to the landing page with the information or product mentioned. Choose the page of your website that is most relevant to the product or service described in this ad. Your ad content should always reflect the landing page and should be relevant to your keywords. 

5. Targeted Ad Copy

Write your ads to describe the product or service you’re advertising.  Ensure your ad headlines relate to the keywords being searched. For instance, if you’re working with the phrase 4×6 postcards, and other related terms, you will create a postcard campaign, write ads about 4×6 postcards, and decide how much money you can put into that campaign. In general, the more specific (tighter) your ad groups are, the more success you will have. Making them tighter means you want as few keywords as possible in each ad group so everything can be highly targeted. Try and have no more than 10 keywords per ad group. Over time you will see that some ads give you better results. Pause the poor performing ads and shift more of your budget to the better performing ones.

Final Remarks

SEO and SEM are closely interrelated. When you use both, and are consistent with keywords across all your marketing methods, you will get better results which includes higher conversion rates. SEO and SEM can seem daunting when you’re starting out but there is a lot of great information available to help.

Link:Quick SEO/SEM Glossary^5,6

Resources

1. What is Search Engine Optimization?
2. Search engine marketing, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
3. Wikipedia: Contextual advertising
4. SearchSOA.com Definitions
5. Pay Per Click Universe: Glossary
6. PPC Glossary

 Courtesy of: Karen Daniels