All about Marketing

It may seem surprising but many companies, big and small, have yet to develop a rational Internet marketing strategy. Considering the Internet has now been used effectively by marketers since 1994, any organization without a strategy to utilize the Internet for marketing is probably making a big mistake. For any organization that still does not have a meaningful Internet marketing effort we offer 10 Reasons why you should.


1. The Go-To Place for Information

Possibly the most important reason why companies need to have an active Internet marketing strategy is because of the transformation that has occurred in how customers seek information. While customers still visit stores, talk to sales representatives, look through magazines, and talk to friends to gather product information, an ever-increasing number of customers turn to the Internet as their primary knowledge source. In particular, they use search engines as their principle portal of knowledge as search sites have become the leading destination sites for
most Internet users. Marketers must recognize that the Internet is where customers are heading and, if the marketer wants to stay visible and viable, they must follow.


2. What Customers Expect

The Internet is not only becoming the resource of choice for finding information, in the next few years it is also likely to be the expected location where customers can learn about products and make purchases. This is especially the case for customers below the age of 25. In many countries, nearly all children and young adults have been raised knowing how to use the Internet. Once members of this group dominate home and business purchases they will clearly expect companies to have a strong Internet presence.


3. Captures a Wide Range of Customer Information

As a data collection tool the Internet is unmatched when it comes to providing information on customer activity. Each time a visitor accesses a website they leave an information trail that includes how they got to the site, how they navigated through the site, what they clicked on, what was purchased, and loads of other information. When matched to a method for customer identification, such as login information, the marketer has the ability to track a customer’s activity over repeated visits to the site. Knowing a customer’s behavior and preferences opens up tremendous opportunities to cater to customer’s needs and, if done correctly, the customer will respond with a long-lasting loyalty.


4. Extreme Target Marketing

The most efficient way for marketers to spend money is to direct spending to those who are most likely to be interested in what the marketer is offering. Unfortunately, efforts to target only customers who have the highest probably of buying has not been easy. For instance, consider how much money is wasted on television advertisements to people who probably will not buy. Yet the Internet’s unrivaled ability to identify and track customers has greatly improved marketer’s ability to target customers who exhibit the highest potential for purchasing products.


5. Stimulate Impulse Purchases

Whether customers like it or not, the Internet is proving to be the ultimate venue for inducing impulse purchases. Much of this can be attributed to marketers taking advantage of improvements in technologies that: 1) allow a website to offer product suggestions based on customer’s online buying behavior, and 2) streamline the online purchasing process. But online impulse purchasing also takes advantage of the “purchase now, pay later” attitude common in an overspending credit card society. How this plays out over time as many customers become overwhelmed with debt will need to be watched and could impact online marketer’s activities.


6. Customized Product and Service Offerings

Companies know they can develop loyal customers when product and service offerings are designed to satisfy individual needs. This has led many online marketers to implement a mass customization strategy offering customers online options for configuring products or services. The interactive nature of the Internet makes “build-your-own” a relatively easy to implement purchasing option. An empowered customer base that feels a company will deliver exactly what they want is primed to remain loyal for long period of time.


7. Takes Prospects Right to the Sale

No other form of communication comes close to turning exposure to promotion into immediate customer action as the Internet, which allows customers to make purchases immediately after experiencing a promotion. Prior to the Internet, the most productive call-to-action was through television informercials that encourage viewers to call toll-free phone numbers. However, moving customers from a non-active state (i.e., watching television) to an active state (i.e., picking up the phone to call the number) is not nearly as effective as getting people to click on an Internet ad while they are actively using the Internet.


8. Conveys Perception of Being a Full-Service Provider

For distributors and retailers the Internet makes it easy to be a comprehensive supplier. Unlike brick-and-mortar suppliers who are often judged by the inventory that is actually on hand or services provided at a store, e-commerce sites can give the illusion of having depth and breadth of inventory and service offerings. This can be accomplished by placing product and service information on the company’s website but behind the scenes having certain orders fulfilled by outside suppliers via shipping and service agreements. With such arrangements customers may feel they are dealing with providers that offer full-service when in reality a certain percentage of the products and service are obtained from other sources.


9. Lower Overhead, Lower Costs, Better Service

Internet technologies are replacing more expensive methods for delivering products and services, and for handling customer information needs. Cost savings can certainly be seen with products and services deliverable in digital form (e.g., music, publications, graphic design, etc.) where production and shipping expenses are essentially removed from the cost equation. Cost savings may also be seen in other marketing areas including customer service where the volume of customer phone calls may be reduced as companies provide online access to product information through such services as Knowledge Bases and answers to Frequently Asked Questions. Field salespeople may also see benefits by encouraging prospects to obtain product information online prior to a face-to-face meeting. This may help reduce the time devoted to explaining basic company and product information and leave more time for understanding and offering solutions to customer’s problems. As these examples suggest, the Internet may lower administrative and operational costs while offering greater value to customers.


10. Create Worldwide Presence

The Internet is a communication and distribution channel that offers global accessibility to a company’s product and service offerings. Through a website a local marketer can quickly become a global marketer and, by doing so, expand their potential target market to many times it current size. Unlike the days before e-commerce when marketing internationally was a time-consuming and expensive undertaking, the uploading of files to establish a website is all that is needed to create a worldwide presence. While establishing a website does not guarantee international sales (there is a lot more marketing work needed for the site to be viable internationally), the Internet provides a gigantic leap into global business compared to pre-Internet days.

Courtesy www.knowthis.com

When it comes to getting the very most out of your SEO efforts, you need to make sure that you’re search engine optimizing with the right search engines in mind. This means that you need to cater to the Big Three. What search engines make up this ever-important trio? The answer is Google, Yahoo! and MSN. The following techniques will help you create both a long and short term SEO strategy for success, with the Big Three search engines in mind.

Google is the clear leader among search engines, so this should be your primary focus, however, Yahoo! and MSN do hold a substantial part of the internet using community’s attention, so they should not be ignored. It should be remembered that while Google does get the most traffic, Yahoo! and MSN can provide better results when it comes to certain specific categories of interest. This is why it is so very important that you cater to all three of the major search engines for your SEO and not just Google. Since ranking is such a lengthy process, it is important that you continuously monitor and improve your site and its keywords with tracking in order to keep ahead of your competitors, and to ensure that your site keeps its high ranks. This requires continuous optimization through growth and updating.

When it comes to the Big Three, the SEO techniques that matter are as follows.

Google:

• Whenever you launch a website, submit it to a search engine, or update a site, a spider from one or all three of the big search engines may crawl your site. However, unless you provide that spider with significant keywords for ranking your site, you’ll never actually achieve rankings that are anywhere near where you want them to be, other than your business name itself. Therefore, make sure that when you are building or adding to your website, it has keywords within its text and in its coding to allow the spiders to index and rank in a way that is favorable to you.

• Use keywords that will ensure better rankings. To best complete your SEO, you need to understand that some keywords will provide you with better results than others. However, if these “best” keywords are already being used by quite a high number of other sites, since the market in your industry is competitive, then it is unlikely that the best keywords will ensure the best ranking. The only time that the ideal keywords will ensure the best results for you is if your service or product is extremely unique or new so that the keyword has not already been used extensively throughout the world wide web. In fact, if you are supplying a new product or service, then you will almost certainly receive great search engine ranking, since the Top Three adore fresh new content. In extremely competitive markets, it may take up to six months for you to see the results you want from your desired keywords. In such cases, a pay-per-click campaign may be required.

The reason that the search engines give such preference to websites offering things that are new and unique are as follows:

• It gives them the opportunity to provide something new.
• There is less competition against something new or unique, so as long as the website has proper SEO, then great rankings are almost automatic.

MSN:

• MSN is typically much faster for crawling, indexing, and listing sites. In fact, if you have done your SEO properly, you can achieve a high MSN ranking within a month, even within the most competitive markets. Therefore, while Google may be your long term SEO goal, MSN can provide for you on the short term.

Yahoo!:

• Though Yahoo! can provide you with a steady traffic flow, actually getting listed can present quite a challenge. While some websites will be crawled as early as a month from their submission, this is a rare occasion, with the standard being closer to three or four months. Once the site is crawled, however, it doesn’t take long for it to be indexed and ranked. As long as your SEO is good, then you may achieve a good rank and see results before Google has even thought about sending a spider your way.

Though there are practically countless search engines out there, it is the Big Three that have you covered for both the short term and the long term for your SEO.

Written by Mark Nenadic

Courtesy http://www.teawithedge.com

As you likely know by now, there is a big difference between effective, quality website content, and search engine optimized (SEO) website content that will obtain the highest ranks in search engines and directories such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. However, to apply SEO properly to your website, you first need to know which keywords to use.

Once you have them, you also need to know if those keywords are working for you, or if you will need to tweak them to get better results. After all, a keyword is only as good as the money it makes for you. The keyword itself is a certain word or phrase that someone would type into a search engine or web directory in order to find your website. The keyword you choose for any given page should describe that page in a way that a regular web surfer would search for it. The keyword should be a direct reflection of the content of that page. They should never contain any random or additional words that have nothing to do with you, your business, or your website. If they do contain these excess words, then you won’t obtain the maximum results from your SEO strategy.

Among the most widely accepted keyword strategies is that the number of keywords in a website should never exceed 21-22. There are sites out there that have well over six and seven hundred keywords, without any content to back those keywords up. Even if they did have content for every one of those keywords, there would be no point, since search engines will ignore any keyword over their limit of 22 words.

Keywords are each counted as one word. Key phrases, on the other hand, are also counted as one, no matter how many words make them up. For example, if you owned a computer company, a keyword could be “computers”. This would be counted as one word. However, you could also have a key phrase “discount computer company”, which would also be counted as one.

Even though key phrases are each counted as only one keyword, you should always keep them very short and straight to the point, without any excess words or puff.

To properly apply these keywords to your website, you first need to come up with a list of 21 or 22 keywords/key phrases that will describe your website content, such as the product or service you are selling. You then need to work them into your content, as well as into the site description coding and any additional information you submit to the search engines upon registration with them.

To identify the keywords, there are many different tools that you can use. You can pull them straight out of the air, have friends and colleagues brainstorm with you, or use one or two of many different softwares that are available for specifically that purpose. One of the most popular among these softwares is the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. You simply need to tell it what your site is about, and it will suggest a number of different potential keywords based on what has been searched for within the last past month.

By making sure that you’re using the right keywords, you’re much more likely to choose exactly the word or phrase that a web surfer might type when searching for what your site has to offer. This is the entire point of SEO. When done properly, you’ll increase the number of visitors to your site, and will therefore experience increased sales. Your website will be more visible, more find-able, and more successful, all by selecting the right wording. Though it may sound complex at first, once you get the hang of it, it does become much more routine. You must remember, though, that this is a time consuming process, and is something that you will need to maintain for the entire life of your website. If you don’t have the time or willingness to dedicate to your website, be certain to hire a professional to do it for you. It is definitely worth the extra few dollars that it will cost. The increased sales will pay for the SEO many times over.


Written by Mark Nenadic
Courtesy http://www.teawithedge.com