Marketing today is vastly different from how it was 10 or 20 years ago. In the past, television and print advertising were the two biggest ways to reach your customer base. However, online marketing has become the best way to reach more people for less investment. Learn more about four of the top ways to reach customers online, and determine which forms of advertising provide the best deals for your company.

Online Marketing on Social Networking

The social networking sites are an important way to reach a wide audience. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr attract a particularly savvy audience with significant buying power. Web developers can reach customers by building branded pages for free on some of these sites, but they are pretty user friendly. These sites are also a great place to buy ad space as well. The most important thing is not to become stagnant. Instead, create ads and content that will grab the attention of potential customers.

Deals and Coupons

If you have a product or service, particularly one you are selling locally, the deal sites likeGroupon, Google Deals and Living Social can reach customers that are ready to buy. On most of these sites you have to provide a significant discount for customers who purchase, but they pay up-front for your service and quite often not all of the certificates are redeemed. If you have a new business, this is an especially good way to introduce your product or service to new customers. Your hope here is repeat business. Provide customers quality service the first time around and they just may come knocking again. Promo and coupons codes are also a great technique. Offer these in limited time spurts and it will have customers keep their eye on your website.

Viral Videos

This isn’t a typical form of advertising by any means. However, if you have a clever marketing idea that you can turn into a short video, you have the chance to create a huge following for your product. One of the biggest examples of this idea in action is the series of commercials for Wonderful Pistachios. These were cute, funny commercials that became an Internet sensation. Not every viral video has to have this level of production value. Just think about ways to reach a large audience using humor or pop culture icons and let the videos market themselves. Or simply impress your customers with an informative and shareable video.

Email marketing

Finally, don’t forget the effectiveness of an email blast. This is different than “spamming” as you only send emails to those who have expressed an interest in your product or service already. Many major companies send out weekly emails advertising their specials and deals. Since you are only contacting customers who want the emails, you have a higher rate of response to the emails than by sending them out blindly.

Jessica is interested in marketing and technology. She enjoys learning about business related applications for social media.

Word of Mouth Marketing Guide

Word of mouth marketing is intertwined in all of our everyday lives. Whether it’s asking a friend what movie you should go see or what sushi restaurant is good in the area, word of mouth marketing will continue to be the most viral, and more importantly most viable, form advertising.

We’ve seen many forms of word of mouth marketing, whether its from an expert analyst on TV or a magazine, or some celebrity claiming it helped to catapult their stardom, opinions continue to shape our buying behaviors. But why?

Well… opinions matter. More so opinions of your peers matter the most. They are usually the most trusted source a person can have trumping what a TV commercial claims or what a sales rep is pitching. A person finds confidence in their peers because “they’ve been there before” and “they understand where I’m coming from”.

This mindset is at the core of why word of mouth marketing and experimental marketing agencies are extremely important to any brand awareness campaign.

Benefits of Word of Mouth Marketing

A major strength of word of mouth or “buzz” marketing, when comparing it to other types of marketing, is its ability to communicate the marketing message to the target audience without coming off as bias. The absence of feeling pressured to make a purchase or choose one product over another is not as evident through word of mouth marketing. It assumes more of a consultative or suggestive approach, which helps the buyer feel more at ease.

While word of mouth marketing has indeed been successful, it is not without its shortcomings. For example, with word of mouth there are two types, positive and negative. Positive word of mouth is great for business, negative word of mouth not so much. For example, your friend may be telling you about how awful a restaurant down the road has been and that you should never go there. You hear that advice and probably don’t end up trying the restaurant with the belief that you’ll have a similar experience.

Then there’s the issue of objectivity; what were the factors that lead to a person having a good or bad experience? All people are different and perceive things differently. They may even have pre-existing opinions about particular product or services based on their upbringing or education. At the root of it all is that people buy things for different reasons Is it this product the best bang for my buck? Do I have to keep others in mind when purchasing? (i.e. having a family and getting a car). Good rule of thumb; always consider the source.

Word of Mouth Marketing and Social Media

Social media has taken word of mouth marketing to the next step. Consulting your “social circles” before making a buying decision and receiving almost immediate feedback has transformed the way that people make purchases.

Buzz about a product, service, app or website now spreads like wild fire, being posted and reposted on various social media sites, tweeted about or written via statuses and blogs. The Internet is now an opinion-spewing machine, allowing people to broadcasts their preferences and tastes to a world that now wants to listen. Even with the endless capabilities that social media contributes to effective word of mouth marketing, there’s always a downside. By asking the connected world for their opinion it’s almost a guarantee that you’ll get mixed results and unaccredited reviews.

Bias opinions about brands, one or two bad experiences or the quintessential “friend of friend told me…” can result in peers posting reviews that may have little or no merit. Unfortunately these reviews are given equal weight to peers who may actually know what they’re talking about. This clash could certainly leave a person overwhelmed and not one step closer to making an “educated decision”.

With any form of advice, a person must take it with a grain of salt. Proper research must be done and understanding who your audience is, is extremely important when weighting the pros and cons of any major decision.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is nothing new in the marketer’s world, but it has made some very specific changes in the business world. In fact, today’s integrated CRM programming, such as Dynamics CRM, is changing businesses from the inside out. Not only is it changing the dynamic between the marketing and sales departments, it’s also changing the way the business interacts with customers, making marketing efforts far more effective.

Changes Within Businesses

When you stop and think about the “old fashioned” way of generating leads, you can quickly see how ineffective that strategy may have been. Marketers used a variety of techniques to generate leads, whether they were good or bad, and then handed those leads off to the sales department. The sales department had to weed through the leads, find the good ones and then land the sale. In this way, many unqualified leads would end up in sales. Salespeople could not be as effective as possible, because they spend so much of their time weeding through poor leads.

Modern CRM applications make the marketing much more effective. Not only does the program help the marketer generate leads, it also helps the marketer qualify those leads, so only the best are passed on to sales.

Not only that, but the marketer can now watch the deal flow after they hand the leads to sales. As a marketer, you can literally see if the sales department is doing its job well. If you are presenting quality leads (and the CRM program will track this), you can hold the sales department accountable for what they do with those leads.

What ends up happening in the most effective scenarios, as discussed by Win Without Pitching, is a scene where the marketing department and the sales department begin working together more closely. Instead of viewing each other as competing departments, they start working as a team. In the end, the business is more effective because the leads are turning into sales.

Changes with Customer Interactions

CRM programming is also changing the way businesses and customers interact. More specifically, it is giving marketers the tools to more effectively reach their customers. It makes customer service far more effective, and this translates into happy customers and better sales.

With today’s CRM programs, you can track a customer from the moment he first finds your company to the time he makes a purchase. Does the customer come to your site from an email or a website link? What pages of the site does he visit? Where does he make the purchase? The program can also trigger follow-up actions automatically, so you can make the most of the customers you have found.

One dynamic aspect of the new CRM programming is the ability to profile customers, as discussed by Insurance Networking. Profiling goes beyond placing customers into target demographics. It looks more deeply into their habits, hobbies and preferences to create a working profile of the individual. This is then categorized within the software and can be used with specific marketing efforts to best reach the market. For instance, if you have an email blast that has something to do with baseball, and you have profiled those in your customer base who love sports, you can make this email more effective by sending it to those individuals.

How does this improve the way you reach your customers and support them once they are in the fold? CRM software allows you to track and monitor customer behavior. This is invaluable as you tailor your marketing efforts specifically to your target market. When you can use software to profile your customers and understand their needs, you can effectively reach them.

The more services and tools CRM programs offer, the more effective businesses, and marketers specifically, will be. By embracing a CRM program for your business, you can maximize your effectiveness, pass on highly qualified leads and improve your ability to reach your target market. CRM is changing the world of marketing, and the savvy marketer will jump on board.

Jessica is interested in marketing and technology. She enjoys learning about business related applications for social media.

This is a guest blog post from Simon Tarrant of Mail & Print. Mail & Print specialise in direct mail and expert print media marketing services. For more information, please visit the Mail & Print website.

Direct Mail in the UK is still alive and well today, despite what many people think. While internet marketing in the United Kingdom and around the world is certainly important, you should not forget about offline media. It can really increase your profits, when done right.

The internet is not the end all:

No matter what you hear, direct mail is still very viable. Companies that rely solely on the internet today often go out of business, if they have no offline component to complement their advertising. Mail can definitely help you stand out from others, because people still love receiving mail. It is a great way to either get new business, or stay in touch with your current customers.

How to use it effectively:

One thing you might want to do is start a newsletter. Physical newsletters can help you stay in touch with your customers and let them know what about the latest news in the industry or niche you work in, as well as give them any tips and strategies for taking advantage of developing trends. It accomplishes the same thing as an email newsletter, only in physical form. Try to send out the newsletter once a month for the best results, as this way you are always at the back of your customers’ minds.

However, newsletters are not the only technique to use. Another effective strategy is to write thank you notes to your best customers. You can also use physical advertising effectively to sell any additional products and services you might offer, most notably high ticket items (i.e. live seminars and coaching programs). If you have an expensive seminar coming up, one of the best ways to fill the seats is through an extensive direct mail campaign.

Do not try to do everything yourself:

If you are new to direct mail, you might want to hire a company to help you establish your campaign. There are services that will assist you in the printing part of the campaign, so you do not have to worry about this yourself. As long as you’re clear on what you need regarding content, you can just hand over your mail marketing campaign to the company and let them handle the rest.

How to find the best company:

Go with someone that is experienced, and that has gotten proven results in the offline advertising world. The best way to find one is to ask other UK business owners, and see which firms they would recommend you.

Conclusion

Offline advertising is still alive and well. The internet can certainly make you a lot of money, but if you do not use offline marketing then you are missing out on a huge opportunity. The important thing is that you stay in touch with your current customers regularly.

The best way to accomplish this is through a monthly newsletter. Printing a newsletter can be a very important way to improve your relationship with your customers, and help them to trust you more. No matter what, hiring a quality company for direct mail in the UK should be a priority. They can really take your efforts to the next level.

Cloudcache.com testimonial by watch marketing expert Michael Walker. Find out if Cloudcache is the right SSL-secured cloud caching service for you!

I’m Michael Walker, the owner of a major affiliate marketing website for watches. I’ve owned affiliate marketing websites and blogs for years, so I’ve become an expert on site administration and making sure my site runs smoothly. Recently, I’ve been looking at cloud caching services for one of my sites, and I chose Cloudcache. I’ve tried other cloud caching services before and they all provide similar services, but I needed to go the extra mile for this site. As a result, the reasons why I chose Cloudcache.com will surprise you.

Cloudcache has many packages tailored to your needs…

One of the big reasons why I chose Cloudcache is that it has a basic version that costs only $19.99 per month, which gives me the flexibility to downgrade. For example, I almost bought a package that was too big for the site I needed, and had Cloudcache not offered many packages then I would have paid much more than I needed to pay.

But premium packages are worth it…

Many cloud hosting services will skimp on their lower end packages to entice you to buy the more expensive version, but Cloudcache takes the opposite approach. Instead, it brings the premium packages up instead of dragging down the starter packages. For example, the premium package lets you set up an SSL on your own domain but all packages let you use an SSL to make your site safer. The set up took me only a minute and I didn’t have to pay a third-party for SSL certification.

Cloudcache makes my site load faster…

Google measures how fast it takes your locally-hosted content to load and penalizes slow pages, so sites with remotely hosted large files load faster regardless of the actual load speed. However, many cloud caching companies simply act as cloud storage for your Website and don’t do much to improve the real webpage load time for human visitors.

…which reduced my bounce-back rate

While remotely hosting your images will help you out with SEO even on a slow server, actual human visitors will not want to wait long for your videos and images to load. Therefore, you need to find a cloud caching service like with many high-quality servers distributed throughout the world so that your site loads fast both for human visitors and search engines.

Cloudcache is secure

People wouldn’t buy anything online if their transactions were not secure, so secure socket layers (SSL’s) have become widely used in eCommerce to protect people’s personal data. As a result, it’s become a trusted standard for online financial transactions.

Cloudcache uses SSL

My Website conducts financial transactions using a third-party shopping cart, so I need so send and receive encrypted data over the Internet. When I was looking at cloud caching services, most of them did not have SSL, which means that my users’ information would not have been secure had I not chosen Cloudcache.

This is a guest post by Michael Walker. Michael owns a large timepiece affiliate marketing website.

Most medium-sized firms and larger these days have a set of dedicated marketing professionals or at least one employee tasked with organising the marketing effort for the whole business. A lot of firms now depend on marketing, and given the on-going rocky economic climate are relying on good advertising strategies to bring in new business.

There are those firms thought that simply do not have the cash flow to increase their marketing spend during rough financial patches, or are too small to justify having any marketing staff at all. Fortunately, there are a few smaller things that companies can do to stretch the budget and deliver some adequate advertising.

1. Advertising doesn’t always have to cost you money. Although this may conjure up negative images of shoddy banners on rundown buildings, why not consider advertising on the side of any buildings you own/operate? Or at least employ some good quality signage with all relevant contact details on? Another option for companies that operate a fleet of vehicles or offer company cars to their staff is small advertising on the side of said vehicles. If done right even professionals like lawyers can use this method.

2. Another avenue to go down, which again might seem cheesy in the mind’s eye, is merchandise. By merchandise I don’t mean branded caps and action figures, but more things like pens and mugs. Think of the amount of times that a pen with company details on has been knocking around the office for months, constantly reminding you of its services. Also, any packaging that your company uses, whether that’s postage bags sent to customers and clients, or carrier bags from retail outlets, should all be branded.

3. Business cards, although an obvious accessory for many professionals isn’t often used by others. This would be missing a golden opportunity to market the firm, as any cards that employees use will more often than not have their details as well as the company’s, and sometimes even includes the company logo. By encouraging current staff to start using cards, and giving new workers a set of their own, it shouldn’t take long for the practice to be implemented across the business.

This is a guest post.

When you promote your affiliate product, either by placing banner, running PPC campaign, article marketing, or any other promotion method, you want people to come to your landing page and buy your promoted product. It’s all about click-through rate. The power to attract potential buyers to your landing page lies in your ability to improve your CTR in your affiliate promotion. Here are 11 quick and valuable tips to improve CTR in your affiliate promotion:

1. Include testimonial in your ad

Testimonial works best to hook your visitors to your ad, because it is a social proof that the product is delivering real result for real users. Inserting testimonial in your ad can significantly increase your CTR. However, this method is best to be used with banner ads.

2. Use simple ad design layout

Remove as many clutters as possible from your ad. Make your ad looks simple, yet inviting. Use only one or two colors in your ad design. Make sure the layout is simple as well. This type of ad will stand out and people will tend to respond better with simple ad design.

3. Simple animation will boost your CTR

Static banner ad can give you a good CTR, but animated banner will give you more. However, keep the animation simple. You don’t want to create an ad that looks like a video. Animation in your ad will increase your reader’s interest simply because the image is keep changing. Although it may distract your readers, it will also give you CTR increase if you have the right offer to promote.

4. Do not use your merchant’s default ads

Always create a new ad for your own affiliate promotion. Your merchant’s default ad banners usually don’t deliver good response because there are too many people using them. You have to think about creating new banner ad based on what your merchant’s default ads.

5. Match your ad with your website’s personality

If you have a website that offers fun joke to your visitors, then the best ad that will work best for your website is a fun ad. The ad’s message should be fun and entertaining so that people will notice its presence. Whatever your website personality, match your ad with it.

6. Address your target audience

Write an ad message that addresses your target audience. For example, if you want to promote an acne product, you can say in your ad: “Feeling depressed with your acne?” This question addresses directly to your target audience, which is acne sufferers. Once you talk directly to them, they will respond to your ad better.

7. Support your ad with a good landing page

There is no point in increasing CTR if your landing page is not good in building people’s interest to buy the product. So, make sure to support your ad with a good landing page that will add more curiosity and interest in your visitors to buy your affiliate product.

8. Affect your audience emotionally with your ad

Most people act based on emotion. If you can touch their emotion, they will usually respond better with your ad. So, you should try to connect with your audience emotionally through your ad. Use words that invoke emotion, such as: “I feel mad when people call me fat!”

9. Ad placement analysis

Ad placement will significantly affect your CTR, so you have to think about this carefully. To find the best ad placement in your website, there is a simple method you can follow. Just open the homepage of your website and see which part of your website catches your attention first. Place your ad in that area.

10. Blend your ad with your website content

Disguise your ad as a part of your website content. In this way, people will respond better to your ad.

11. Text link with high relevancy

You don’t always need to rely on banner ads or PPC ads in order to get the best CTR for your affiliate promotion. Text link with high relevancy will do the best for your promotion. In this way, your link will be a part of your content, and people will click on it more easily than banner ads. However, one thing that you need to remember is relevancy. Always promote product that is relevant with your website content.

Those quick and valuable tips can be your quick guide to get high CTR for your affiliate promotion. If you want to get more response from your ads and eventually get more sales from your campaign, you should apply those tips in your affiliate marketing promotion.

This article has been written by Kevin Pritchard who is a contributor to click discounts co uk where you can get some useful vouchers to help you make some interesting savings.

As of last week, small and medium size businesses have an affordable social media monitoring and management option. Alerti, a social media monitoring and management tool based in Paris, France, launched the English version of their service that has already garnered thousands of French-speaking users.

Alerti offers a streamlined content interface, integrated work-flow management, and direct social media profile administration that starts at less than $1 a day. You can also download the free iPhone app that controls the monitoring and work-flow functions. It will integrate with the social media administration in future releases.

“After a year of consistent growth in France, we are excited to launch our English language version. We’ve seen great response so far from small and medium size businesses who need integrated social media monitoring solutions that allows them to monitor, analyze and manage their online presence in an affordable way.”

– Séverine Faurax, Co-Founder and CEO of Alerti

Based on a search engine that continuously scans all types of online content, Alerti collects all search results into a single interface, providing analytical tools to measure community engagement. Streamlined work-flow integration empowers users to share alerts and content out to internal groups, customize graphs of data, and interact with social media communities straight from the Alerti interface.

Alerti is scalable as a business grows, offering a tiered month-to-month subscription structure with no long-term commitment required.

To try it out for free with a 3 month trial, go to Alerti and register using the “MN” Bonus Code.

Let us know what you think!

What is Personal Branding?

I was recently looking for books about personal branding in the Kindle store, and unfortunately many of them were spam. However, I did find one kernel of wheat in the Amazon chaff, called What Is Personal Branding? How to Create a Memorable & Powerful Brand that Sells YOU! by Murray Newlands and Jim Kukral, that stands apart from the everyday marketing books that marketing types and aspiring marketers might pick up off the shelf.

Newlands and Kukral seek to make a book that’s accessible to ordinary people who want to learn about personal branding without oversimplifying any key concepts. Many books deem this too difficult, and thus aim at only one audience. They are either too technical, which makes them inaccessible to aspiring marketers looking to make money online, or they’re too basic, so professional marketers don’t learn anything new.

Books that try to appeal to both often get stuck in the middle ground by having concepts that professional marketers already know, but are too advanced for beginning marketers to understand. Kukral and Newlands, on the other hand, appeal to both groups. They do not lowering their content to the lowest common denominator, but they keep What is Personal Branding? accessible with easy-to-understand textual illustrations of what they’re trying to convey. Consider the following passage by Newlands:

Three out of four recruiters will look up information about you online, and those who do will use that information to eliminate more than one in three candidates they are considering.

This tells people who don’t have their foot in the door yet to make sure their Facebook profile pic conveys a brand, probably a professional brand, suitable for the job they’re applying to. But it also speaks on a deeper level: You have a personal brand that affects people’s perceptions of you, and even small things like what people find about you online can have dire consequences. In addition, once you’re aware of this brand, Newlands says that you should shape it so that it benefits you:

Taking the responsibility and owning your own personal brand puts you in the driver’s seat, and you will find that your awareness, not only of your brand, but of the way your brand interacts with and affects your business and field overall can be a powerful thing.

Newlands initially sets up a feeling of powerlessness by placing the reader into the perspective of a potential employee who’s just gotten a background check from a potential employer. Here, he flips it by giving the reader a feeling of control, since they can be in control of their personal brand (by shaping it online) instead of letting their brand control them (by not getting a job because of what people find about you online). He reinforces this point again later on, so that the reader is thinking about it before going deeper into the book:

Owning your personal brand means owning your personal future. Personal branding not only allows you to harness what is your essence in the here and now, it gives you the base to build on it as you grow, change, and build for the future.

Throughout the book, Newlands and Kukral use shifts like these to solidify advanced marketing concepts that many professional marketers haven’t even thought about yet. To further distil their knowledge, Newlands and Kukral explain concepts by using metaphors and common situations that most readers have been in. This makes the book easier for beginners to relate to and easier for marketing veterans to quickly learn advanced concepts so that they can take their marketing career to the next level.

Steve Sims

Steve Sims graduated from UC Berkeley in 2011, and now works for a PR and marketing consulting firm in San Francisco.

Find out how to use site acceleration to boost your marketing campaign!

Most potential leads are lost within the first eight seconds of hitting your landing page. This means that, at most, you have eight seconds to capture someone’s attention. Eight seconds. This is after they’ve already seen your landing page’s header (assuming they found your page on a search engine) and have probably read your meta description or at least skimmed the first few sentences of your landing page and decided it’s relevant.

People who write for websites are usually the same people who do the day-to-day WordPress work on the site, simply because advanced technical knowledge is not needed to run most websites. As a result, the people who tweak the site after the initial design are not always technically adept, and even more frequently have a stronger background in writing than in marketing. Especially after Google’s Panda update, webmasters try to write as much text as possible as long as it’s over 500 words and spend less energy on making sure that people actually can use their site simply because they don’t have the time to anymore.

This means that the people writing a website’s content often don’t think about how their audience will react to other aspects of their site, especially technical ones like load time. With an increasing emphasis on rich content like videos and images, a lot of websites take so long to load that potential leads get frustrated and leave, even though they’re already interested in the site and have clicked on an appealing headline in a search engine.

That’s why my company provides a content delivery network. MaxCDN makes sites load faster by hosting the website on multiple, supercharged servers, instead of having it hosted on just one server. This means that people who would be geographically far away from a traditional server won’t have to wait long for the site to load (as an added bonus, this gives you free SEO since Google ranks sites that load faster higher on its search results). Furthermore, MaxCDN hosts video content on separate superfast servers so that the video doesn’t slow down your site’s load time for Google.

With site acceleration, you can boost your SEO so you have more potential leads and increase conversion rate so that more people buy your product!

David Henzel

This is a guest post by David Henzel. David is the Vice President of Marketing at NetDNA, a company dedicated to helping people increase eCommerce revenue.