Creating Web Presence in Today's Business World

Marketing & Strategy

With power shifts continuing…marketing is morphing itself into a world that influences your brand, your product and your services.

Consumers have grabbed ahold of Social networks in such a frenzy that those networks have skyrocketed in growth five-fold.  Building Social Strategies is vital to businesses surviving in this crucial time. To be successful, marketers must use a strategic, systematic approach in setting up this process.

*Listed below are seven practical ways to be efficient in this strategy.

1. Socialize content.
2. Word of mouth with Twitter
3. Aggregate existing content.
4. Crowdsource your support.
5. Sponsor bloggers.
6. Sponsor events.
7. Let go with APIs.

*Additional things to do:

• Manage social media for the long term.
• Start small but plan for the long term.
• Accurately prove effectiveness through social application metrics.
• Measure based on objective
• Develop the right roles.
• Social media strategist and community manager
• Educate through social media supplements.  Like Procter & Gamble’s social media lab

*Courtesy of Forrester’s Research.

Recession Marketing

What is Recession Marketing?  

Forbes has an informative article written about this..speaking about “Recessions offer what may be unprecedented opportunities to market in and environment of relatively less noise, as others cut back.”  They also warned that ad agencies would pressure clients to increase their budgets in the face of a downturn.  Basically speaking, if clients don’t spend, agencies don’t have business.  It’s definitely a good read…giving you some great pointers on where to increase and where to decrease.  

Forrester’s Research, talks about:

Three important steps to Recession Marketing.

1. What consumers want from brands
2. Prioritizing your marketing spend
3. Engaging today’s consumer online and offline

Peer opinions carry considerable weight, examples are as follows:

• Valued opinion of a friend who has used product.
• Reviews-consumer reviews are highly valued on whether to buy or use service. Many sites offer this consumer review/poll.
• Online reviews by editors of a content site.  Gives a footing to online sales.

Consumers are showing they want more control…by not trusting popup ads, rather trusting emails they have signed up for.  If you’ve been using those pesky popups…now is a good time to get rid of them!  Other trusted agenda’s are Brand Web sites, In-store ads, Consumer opinions posted online.  

With personal optimism declining, recession has been moving people toward comfort and connection showing that consumers are shopping less and researching more.  With the consumer expecting to have less to spend, marketers also have less to spend, meaning brand loyalty has become more important than ever.  Marketers must be able to provide comfort and reassurance while doing more to meet the consumers’ unique needs.

Digital marketing is seeing a lot more increase than offline marketing.  Places like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Web Site development and Blogs have increased rapidly while the high cost traditional methods of marketing such as radio and television have dwindled down to a crawl.

“Given your decreased budget, how is your spending affected in each of the following areas?”

Base: 45 marketing leadership CMOs who have had their 2009 marketing budget reduced

Lisa Bradner a Principle Analyst at Forrester Research showed statistics representing that 72% of consumers say prior experience drives their brand loyalty, along with 58% of online adults say they trust online reviews more than any other medium except emails from friends.  Those are pretty big numbers.  She also found that in a recession many marketers are leaning toward digital as opposed to traditional.

With budgets being tighter than ever, it has driven the need for tough choices and prioritization.  On that note…Smart marketers will take that leap not only to acquire new customers/clients, but to also enhance the brand experience with the old ones as well.

SEO is BIG business

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is all about optimizing (making the best use of a resource).  It is about rearranging or rewriting data to improve efficiency and/or retrieval.  SEO is BIG business as it improves your site to show up higher in search results, meaning more traffic and more business.  (See Wikipedia’s definition.)

An SEO expert will analyze what search engines look at when they rank websites, then placing keywords in the right places, allowing the search engines to do their work at the most efficient level.  Results? Higher rankings, increased traffic, better search results.

The majority of your web traffic is driven by major commercial search engines, like Google, Yahoo!, MSN & AskJeeves…so if your site cannot be found by these search engines, or your content isn’t able to be inputted in their databases, you are missing out on the incredible opportunities available via search on the internet.  Search engines are the primary method of navigation for the vast majority of Internet users.  Targeted visitors to a website can and will provide exposure, publicity, revenue, increasing traffic helping your business succeed.  SEO is a valuable investment, whether it’s through time or finances, that can have an exceptional rate of return for your business.

Search Engines technology is a continually evolving project looking to improve methods, along with crawling the web deeper to increase relevant results to internet users.  Additionally, SEO can help boost rankings where relevant content can be found so searchers will readily see it.  This being very important as the online environment has become increasingly competitive, with companies who do perform SEO having an advantage in visitors and customers.

Can I do this myself? or do I need to hire someone?  

There are some simple basics to put in place as it’s really not “rocket science”, it’s figuring out some keywords for your site, then putting those keywords in the right places.  Those places include – title bar(text that shows up at the top of your browser), headers, headlines and/or bold text on a page and meta data (helpful information in a page’s code that’s not visible in a browser).  This task can seem daunting to a lot of people so using a firm with good SEO experience would be advisable for those.

For those of you who DIY…Some great SEO tools to use:  SEOTOOLS.  Also visit this SEOGuide.

How does your page rank?