Category: Marketing Strategies

Marketing Strategies

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5 Building Blocks Of A Solid Business Marketing Plan

Are you tired of watching your business marketing plans fail? There is no secret formula. I’ve studied every imaginable kind of business marketing plan. I’ve discovered that there are five elements in a successful business marketing plan.

Virtually every business marketing plan failure I have seen misses the mark on one of these keys. You will need to incorporate all five of the keys in a way that allows them to support and enhance one another to achieve maximum results.

1. Goal orientation. Your business marketing plan should be created around the marketing goals you want to achieve during the period covered by the plan. This keeps all activity focused on results and provides a basis for measurement of achievements.

2. Reach potential customers where they are. Putting ads here and there and sending somewhat random promotional efforts into the world does not mean the right people will ever see them. More than ever before, you must go to where your customers are if you expect to have any hope of getting their attention.

3. Parts of the business marketing plan need to address potential customers at each stage of the buying cycle or decision making process. People need different information at each stage of the process. Your marketing plan needs to systematically move each prospect through the process.

4. Coordinate everything in the plan. Plan and time the release of each piece of your marketing plan for maximum effect and in a way that allows various pieces of the total plan to support and reinforce each other. Be clear about the customer need your product or service can alleviate, and keep that focus.

5. Continuous improvement. Analyze, re-test, adjust, update and refine. Every ad and every e-mail message will meet with a different level of success. The only way your marketing will improve is by testing, analysis. Then learn from your mistakes and make appropriate changes.

Your business marketing plan will be a winner if these five components are part of the plan. In fact, I suggest a periodic review of these components to be certain they are guiding your plan and keeping your efforts targeted.

If you are a small business owner and want more information about lead generation, view the free video, “How Article Promotion Can Send 25,000 – 50,000 New Prospects to Your Web Site Every Month – For Free.”

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Does Your Business Marketing Strategy Meet These Criteria?

How much better would your business marketing strategy be if someone told you how to evaluate it? Marketing plans can fall below expectation for several reasons. One very common reason for missing the mark is the strategy and not the marketing plan or even the marketing tactics.

Here are five tests of a business marketing strategy that must be met if your marketing plan and your activities are expected to succeed.

1. Shared goals with business strategy. It is absolutely necessary that you align your business marketing strategy with your business strategy. The marketing strategy needs to emanate from the business strategy. For example, if your plan is to grow your legal practice by promoting a focus on estate planning, it does not make a great deal of sense to advertise a focus on legal defense for juvenile delinquents.

2. Respect the budget. The budget sets the limits for your business marketing strategy. No matter what audience you need to reach or what product or service you are marketing, budgets define reality. You must keep things in perspective within those limits if you expect to meet your marketing objectives.

3. Comprehensive. Your business marketing strategy should outline all of your marketing goals, as well as the tactics you will use to accomplish them. It needs to encompass all of your marketing activities – traditional, internet, mobile, point of sale, etc. But it also needs to allow just enough flexibility to permit you to make some changes in order to take advantage of an unanticipated opportunity with a very high chance of success.

4. Balanced. It is unlikely that you will be reaching out to a single, narrowly defined demographic within your target audience or that you will use a single marketing tactic. A successful business marketing strategy will include ways to reach several segments of your target audience and will speak to those people through more than one medium.

5. Customer centric. A good strategy will result from profound knowledge of your target market. It will use the tactics calculated to speak clearly to that audience. It will reflect your understanding of the information they need to hear and the method of communication they prefer.

If your business marketing strategy includes these five marks of a good strategy, you can rest assured that you are starting down the marketing path headed in the right direction and with the basic tools you need to reach your desired destination.

If you own a small business and want more information about lead generation, view the free video, “How Article Promotion Can Send 25,000 Visitors to Your Site Each Month – For Free.”

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Local Business Marketing – 10 Tools to Include in Your Online Marketing Plan Toolkit

Local business marketing online is an essential piece of your local business’s profit model, as it will enable you to be successful today and for years to come. It’s the local residents who become your lifetime customers. Small business owners frequently fail when they don’t acknowledge the significance of local advertising online.

Promoting your local business online means reaching out to your existing clientele as well as your future customers. Gone are the days when you could just put some ads in local newspapers and the customers would pour in. Today when someone is looking for a product or service, they usually go online and search through Google, Yahoo or one of the other search engines. What is happening more and more is, when somebody conducts a search, they type in the city name and the thing they are looking for (i.e. “Vancouver piano movers” or “piano mover in Vancouver”) in order to narrow down the search. The growing popularity of this type of search is providing a huge opportunity for you, as a local business owner, to promote your company.

Local business marketing is all about creating relationships. Your website becomes your virtual business and prospective clients get to know you through the information they get there. This is why branding and trust building needs to be a vital part of your local Internet marketing strategy. Buyers today are savvy and generally have a short attention span. The first thing they look for is social proof (reviews/testimonials) and trust factors. If you include personal pictures of yourself and your staff and also add your personal story, it makes your website feel more believable and trustworthy.

There are many other components to a successful local business marketing plan. The following is a list of some of them:

1. Local Keyword Research – you can search for strongly appropriate local terms (ie: florists in Vancouver) by using keyword tools like Google Adwords Keyword Tool or WordPot, both of which are free.

2. Local Business Search – you can submit your business information to local search listings such as Google Local and Yahoo Local. These are great to use for getting more traffic to your site. More traffic equals more customers.

3. Online Business Directories – there are many directories you can submit your site to. For instance there are the major directories, local directories, niche directories and review directories. By submitting to as many of these directories as you can you will be building credibility and trust by showing up in many places on the Internet. This also is a great way to build backlinks, reviews and local ranking. Some of these directories are a very good source of traffic, too.

4. Article Marketing – article marketing is the practice of writing content rich articles for use on your website, or multiple other sites, to drive traffic and backlinks to your main site. This is a powerful and effective tool that is often underestimated. When you submit an article to the article directories, if someone likes it, they can put it on their website or blog and, the next thing you know, it’s gone viral and you could find yourself being considered an expert in your field. That’s a good thing because it means lots more traffic. Remember…more traffic equals more customers!

5. Blogs and Web 2.0 – blogs and web 2.0 (social networking sites) are another way to publish content or share information over the Internet. When you are blogging, using Twitter or Facebook etc, it is very important to be consistent. You should post to these sites weekly at the very least.

6. Internet Video – using Internet video is extremely powerful both on-site and off-site. You can use videos to grab attention, brand yourself, build trust and educate. It’s a great way to get rankings in the search engines and pull searchers to your website. It’s also gets you exposed in multiple places. When you submit your videos to online video sites like YouTube and SmugMug, they can “go viral” just like your articles can.

7. Online Press Releases – this is another powerful way to provide exposure, credibility and backlinks for your local business. If you use SEO (search engine optimization) tactics on your press release, you could get it ranked highly on the search engines and get more great exposure. Sometimes, if a press release is very informative and/or entertaining, the local newspaper, TV or radio picks it up. As you can imagine, that kind of publicity is invaluable.

8. Geo-targeted Pay Per Click Advertising – this tactic is the quickest way to get traffic and the quickest way to test keywords. It can be, however, the quickest way to spend your online local business marketing budget. Depending on how much Google, Yahoo or Bing decides to charge you every time your ad gets clicked on, this method of advertising your business could be profitable or disastrous. If you are new to PPC, please be careful. The cost can accumulate really quickly.

9. Classified Ad Sites – these sites, like Craigslist for example, are another super way to get traffic and backlinks. Because they are free sites, they are a great tool for testing the rankability of keywords. A lot of these sites allow you to Social Bookmark your ad which will add backlinks to your website. An additional advantage to these sites is that you can ping your ad. When you ping your ad you are attracting the attention of the search engines, pointing them to your ad and thus to your site.

10. Audio Marketing – this is another fantastic tool to provide rich content both on-site and off-site. Audio marketing gets your visitors engaged and it is much more memorable than text alone. Using audio also makes the message more personable. Having testimonials on audio makes them more powerful and believable.

These are but a few of the local business marketing tools that you can use to grow your customer base enormously. They are, however, extremely time consuming and they do require Internet marketing knowledge and skill. A lot of small business owner’s have neither the time nor the expertise to implement a successful marketing plan. In these cases, perhaps the best marketing tool of all is the local business marketing firm or consultant. Whether you decide to tackle your online marketing on your own or hire a professional, local online advertising is critical to the success of today’s local businesses.

There are over 1 billion local searches done every month. Are your future customers finding you?

Vicki Fjellner is a local business marketing professional and owner of Local-BusinessMarketing.com located in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Please visit Local-BusinessMarketing for further information.

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Importance of Business Marketing

In today’s world, marketing is unarguably the most important thing in business. If you want to taste success in business, you have to indulge in business marketing. Moreover, marketing is not just aimed at converting individuals to customers these days. Big businesses are also the target of business marketing. If the big fish of the business world is beside you, you can think of getting unprecedented success in your work. Thus, try to impress the giants with your business marketing.

It is obvious that everybody cannot generate brilliant business strategies overnight. Moreover, with the expense associated with the traditional forms of marketing like the newspaper or television is so high that many young business persons get a tad disappointed. This problem can be easily overcome, thanks to the internet. The World Wide Web provides a lot of opportunities for you to showcase your business ideas and that too, at minimal cost.

Cheap Business Marketing Methods:

Once the medium of business marketing has been decided upon, you need to work on the way in which you will market your business. You can find a lot of material on this subject on the internet itself. In order to get some inspiration, you can take a look at the work of successful businesspersons. Try to use simple yet effective means of marketing your business online. There are a lot of such options like link exchange which work wonders in promoting your business.

Another good business marketing strategy is to publish your webpage. Once you publish your webpage, you ensure that any individual surfing the net can view your business when he or she searches for content pertaining to your business. In order to make your website even more popular, you can post interactive stuff regularly. Other methods include making your site colorful and attractive. Make the webpage appealing in very way and try to ensure that it captures the attention of the surfer.
In case you have a little more money to spare, you can leave the designing of the web page to an expert. You can get hold of a web designer who can transform your business website into a hot and happening surfer destination. Some professional work will help you a great deal in grabbing the attention of others to your business.

Another way in which you can do business marketing is through press conferences. Press conferences provide much needed publicity for your business. And one thing about business is that the more people know you and your work, the higher your chances of being successful.

The best thing about the kinds of business marketing mentioned above is that all of them are quite cheap options that can be easily tried out. Online business marketing is a very profitable yet cheap way to promote your business. So start off a website and begin incorporating new ideas to excel in business marketing.

Follow these simple tips to achieve what you desire most in business. If you are able to market your business well, you will soon taste sweet success.

Simon Johnnson is the director of content for Executive Gift Shoppe. They specialize in business card holders and other desk accessories.
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Can Someone Please Define Internet Marketing!

Back in 1994 after you created a website for your business, marketing was fairly simple. Generally you would make changes to your HTML code for search engine optimization and for the most part promoted your website through offline methods. These may have included business cards, letterhead, print advertising and other such methods. Whether or not your site was listed on the only search engine, Yahoo, at the time was purely based on how well you optimized our web pages. If you did a good job then multiple pages of your site would be listed consecutively for a search.

Twelve years later in 2006 the entire perspective of marketing your site on the web has become a science requiring a degree. Although, we are all eager to market our website on the web we are somewhat unclear how to accomplish this task through a maze of policies set by the Big 3 search engines – Google, MSN and Yahoo. Most businesses would first seek out professional advice. In the process of seeking professional Internet Marketing advice, your story may look something like this.

“By now I had heard about pay-per-click, something called Ad Sense, link exchanges, banner advertising and it all sounds quite confusing. After all as a business owner, my forte is to run my company, not try and figure out how to market a website on the Internet. As I seek out professional advice I get quite a variety of different stories. One person calls themselves Internet marketer and the only thing they provide is Pay-Per-Click advertising campaigns. The next person I speak to also consider their business to be in Internet Marketing, yet the only service provided is Search Engine Optimization. Even that term was somewhat vaguely defined to me. I continue to hear about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but it seems to vary from changes to our website to advertising on the web. I am most definitely puzzled at this point. Can anyone describe what Internet Marketing is actually about?”

Advertising and Marketing has always been handled by professional firms that have college educated individuals and understand the difference between Advertising and Marketing. In case you are wondering, here are the definitions of Advertising and Marketing.

– Marketing is the process or technique of promotion, selling and distributing a product or service.

– Advertising is to make your product or service publicly known; an announcement to call public attention by emphasizing qualities to arouse a desire to purchase.

One of the primary issues of advertising and marketing on the Internet is that you may not necessarily reach someone educated in the field of advertising and marketing. Instead it is someone that has educated themselves about a particular area of Internet Marketing. For instance they may have specialized in Affiliate Marketing or Pay-Per-Click campaigns while another individual may know more about making changes to your website for search engine optimization. Currently these types of services are fragmented and they do require someone with the appropriate skills to manage an entire Internet marketing campaign.

If we take a look at all the different areas of Internet marketing you will find the following in your list:

Research, Analysis, Planning and Strategy
We need to research key phrases and look at the data to determine our title and description.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
I believe it is safe to say that SEO is not advertising on the web. SEO is strictly modifications to your HTML code and website. Making sure your website is HTML validated, density checks, the keywords, phrases, content, alt descriptions, anchor titles and so on are in place for the entire website.

Internet Marketing
This is the actual process of promotion as the definition of marketing was described earlier. Some would call this Natural Propagation Marketing, others will call it Organic marketing. With this form of marketing you can rest assured the shelf life of the efforts put forth can be measured in years.

Internet Advertising
Although, the shelf life of Internet advertising can be measured in seconds and can hemorrhage a business financially, there are three areas of Internet advertising. The first would be to utilize an Internet Advertising Network (IAN) to submit a variety of banners through out a variety of websites in order to narrow your advertising to an area with the most response. Another area is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns such as Google Ad Sense or Yahoo Search Marketing. Lastly, you may consider direct advertising on websites that you have found to be of value to your business with high page ranking.

Management & Reporting
It is necessary to monitor all the various activities you are pursuing on the web. Internet marketing gives us the ability to measure almost all aspects of our advertising and marketing campaigns with the push of a button. You will want to keep an eye on your website statistics, check your Google page rank, your Alexa traffic ranking, and your link popularity overall to name a few.

If we consider all the various parts that are required for proper business Internet marketing, you will find the industry moving towards consolidation in the future. Equally, we will find that advertising and marketing on the web will eventually fall back to educated professionals who not only understand advertising and marketing, but will now include their education in Internet marketing as well.

Melih Oztalay is the CEO of SmartFinds Internet Marketing. Internet marketing is not only about knowledge and experience, but also about imagination. Visit SmartFinds Internet Marketing.

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Ways You Can Implement Internet Marketing

Marketing is a broad discipline that has something to do with the processing of communicating or sharing the wanted value of a particular product or service to the target customers or users. This is for the targeted customers to have a perception on what the products or services can provide to them. On the side of the marketers, this is being done in order to project an image that will influence the perception of the public. Any company needs this. In this light, there are various ways that you can fulfill this. These are either you do it on your own, ask for help or let others do it for you.

Doing it on your own
Firstly, you can do it on your own. This is the cheapest option that you can have. However, this could only be effective and applicable if you have the technical know-how about internet marketing or internet reputation management. This is because you need to understand that marketing generally consists of two important aspects, which are about your company’s reputation and sale talks. You will not just go out there and talk to people about the advantages of your products and services. Prior to that, you must have an established name and character, which your buyers can identify as yours.

Seeking help from others
Secondly, another option that you can do is to ask for help from other people. Consequently, this will obviously incur you some costs. This is because an expert will be working with you in every single step of the way. They will be your partners in implementing the kind of social media strategies that you have in mind. Of course, this would still require you to do some technical things. Hence, it would be ideal if you have background on Internet Marketing Training and the like. Nevertheless, they would help you set your campaign goals, as well as create your own social identity and many more.

Letting others do it for you
Thirdly, but one of the most hassle-free way of handling your internet reputation management and marketing activities is by letting other people to do the entire work for you. This is because you do not have to worry about anything at all. You just need to pay for their service and they will already take good care of everything. However, convenience comes with a price. Of course, this will incur you the highest cost among the three options shown here. The advantage of this, in contrary, is that you will be able to focus on the operations side of your company.

Source: http://xgbook.com/article.php?id=632645

Creatine Marketing is an experienced Content writer and publisher for Business Development. Visit at www.CreatineMarketing.com to know more about Online Marketing Companies

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Effective Online Presence With Internet Marketing Strategies

In this World Wide Web edge, building a website is not sufficient to enhance your online business in Sydney, Australia along with rest of the world. Earlier, building a website was assumed to be enough to increase your online sales, that too within a short span of time. But now the whole scenarios have been changed as there have been drastic changes in the rate of increment online businesses. There are lots of websites which are involving in the online business but there were a few websites earlier. Thus, competitions have become very tough now for online businesses. You have to make an effective online presence if you want to increase your business as well as sustain in the market.

Search engines have also vital roles to increase website traffic within a short period of time. It has been observed that 70% of visitors or even more than it come to any site through search engines. Now, you can imagine the importance of search engines for your online business. Hence, if your site is at first page of SERPs (search engines result pages) in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN Bing along with many others, you will easily get largest number of visitors through your site. You can easily convert these visitors into your potential customers if you provide good services according to clients’ specific needs and requirements that should be too within their financial limit.

One of the most important things for website optimizer is to make professional internet marketing strategies by identifying the current trends of major search engines including Google, Yahoo as well as MSN Bing. Now, the time have been changed, hence search engines have also changed their searching algorithms and they always tend to change it without disclosing them publicly. In these scenarios, website optimizer can make effective strategies to market your website over Internet if they have deep and thorough knowledge about the current searching trends that are followed by search engines.

In this competitive era, there are numerous SEO companies in Sydney, Australia which have been providing fully professional SEO services there as per customers’ special needs and requirements. But you have to choose the best one which has made well reputation in the market over the time by following search engines’ guidelines. You should also visit their official website to know about their past SEO works that they have been done for their potential clients. After satisfying with the result and strategies, you can choose the SEO company for your website optimization.

Aus Search Marketingis a reputed SEO company in Sydney, Australia which has been providing ethical search engine optimization services in Sydney along with many other cities for many years. For more information please visit: internet marketing strategies