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Archive for INTERNET MARKETING – Page 10

Posted by DBC Digital on

May 29, 2012

Jump in to Social Media, Denver!

Ho-Hum Words, Exciting Concept

Boring words? “Content marketing.” Exciting concept? Content marketing. Yep. Same two words. It’s almost impossible to escape social media marketing’s dependance and effectiveness content marketing.

Content marketing is perhaps the most pervasive and, some would say, really one of the few effective marketing approaches still available for Denver-based clients.

What about all the other media options?

Think about that for a moment. Newspaper ads? As fewer people read actual print newspapers (Strike 1!), fewer advertisers use newspapers to market their products and services (Strike 2!) resulting in less ad revenue for newspapers, shuttering or diminishing many of them (Strike 3). TV advertising? Are you using your Tivo or DVR to record commercials? In fact, last week Dish Network announced a new service called “Hopper” that allows you to completely skip commercials on recorded prime-time shows.

All in all, traditional marketing, while still effective in some areas, is losing its effectiveness in others.

So, what do you do?

Can you utilize social media for marketing? For many in Denver, the ability to effectively use Social Media may ultimately determine the profit margin, if not the very survival, of their business.

So, now what? How do you create compelling, persuasive content for your social media marketing? The most important rule here is to write to your niche audience and make sure they can find it when they need it.

Here are 8 things to remember, plus a bonus one for free. (Wait, what? We’re giving free advice? Who’s idea was that?). Here we go:

They’re called “social” networks for a reason. Short of joining several associations and attending gala affairs at the Denver Hyatt each night, these networks enable you to connect with potential customers on a social, interactive basis. Find out which platforms your “best” (most active, most profitable) customers are engaging with and communicate with them there.

Tip: While there are over 400 categorized Social Networking Sites active globally, the most useful ones are probably Facebook (if you are focused in a Business-to-Consumer category), and LinkedIn (if you are Business-to-Business category) with Twitter and YouTube helping to grow your connections with either group).

Remember, social media credibility takes time to show results (because you are building relationships which don’t happen overnight).

P.S. Don’t forget that your own blogs are one of the most effective things you can do to be found on the internet.

Cross pollinate social networking platforms. If you are active on more than one platform, make sure your messaging is consistent across all of them. otherwise you’ll have some ‘splainin’ to do when people start to blog about inconsistencies in your messaging (and they will).
If you build it, they will come. Consider social media success as much art as science. Research popular blogs and websites that focus on your topics and determine why they are popular. Then use what you learn for your own success. Remember, we all want to be amused, entertained, educated, and engaged.
Create. Whether you write a blog or produce an instructional video, the idea is to make it entertaining/beneficial enough so that people will keep coming back for more.
Pump up the volume! Maximizing marketing effectiveness requires attention-grabbing headlines, subtitles, keywords that fit the story you’re trying to tell and tools that enable people to share your content (e.g., hyperlinks). Social media marketing without pop is like a shark that stops swimming-it soon dies.
“Mobilize” your efforts. Your content must be accessible (formatted) for PC/Mac desktops, laptops, and smart-phones, tablets and other PDAs.
Don’t rest on your laurels. Wrote a great piece? Posted an awesome video? Well, only if your audience thinks so! Monitor your feedback (are you seeing increases your followers, “likes” and connections?) and make keep making improvements based on that feedback.
Rinse and repeat. Determine what works. Get rid of what doesn’t. Give your prospects and clients what they want.
And the bonus tip? Your ego is not always your amigo. No matter how intelligent, competent, creative, revolutionary your ideas are, “they don’t mean a thing if they ain’t got that swing” that your clients and prospects want to dance to!

Categories : INTERNET MARKETING, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Posted by DBC Digital on

May 9, 2012

Traditional and Inbound Marketing: Together?

Who knew?

As a hybrid marketing agency based in Denver, we have the advantage of seeing what is working for our clients across the country as well as here in Denver. One of the most intriguing insights we have seen recently is the rebound of direct mail especially when it is connected to inbound marketing.

If you’re a business owner who thinks direct mail marketing died in 2008, think again. A 2011 Channel Preference Study conducted by Epsilon Targeting reveals that despite bleak economic conditions, as well as the overall decline of print media and the rise of online (Inbound) marketing, direct mail still remains the consumer’s preferred channel for initial marketing messages from companies.

This may come as a surprise to many who feel that direct mail is about as old-school as it gets. And, don’t we inbound marketers tell you that offline print marketing is interruptive, anyway? How can it fit into today’s brave new inbound marketing world? As it turns out, actually very well!

How to Combine Traditional and Inbound Marketing for Better Returns

The truth is, direct mail marketing has been helping companies increase returns on their inbound marketing efforts. By keeping you connected to your customers, direct mail increases your prospects’ awareness of you and your company. And aside from the ability to embed QR codes, as well as the versatility of Variable Data customization of images and messages, direct mail provides one of those all-important “touches” that boost brand recognition and keeps you top of mind when it’s time to make a purchase.

According to The Direct Marketing Association, companies spent a little over $50 billion on direct mail in 2011—an increase of 4.6% over the previous year. And, direct mail expenditures are expected to rise at least 3.6% per year through 2014. So we encourage you to think about how you can help improve your marketing by incorporating direct mail marketing into your overall strategies.

How? Somewhat ironically, online and mobile technologies are helping direct mail make its resurgence, and you can use these same tools to get started. Postcard mailings, envelopes, brochures and forms can contain PURLS (Personal URLs) and QR (Quick Response) codes that link readers to your site, your webcasts and your product information. With these, customers can easily download your white papers, coupons or special offers—right from their mobile devices, right from your mailings.

First Contact

In this way, direct mail can become the initial form of engagement, the hook that directs interested, qualified leads to your site where they can be nurtured through the sales process using the all-important inbound marketing methods. Regularly scheduled mailings then will keep your prospects connected to you and give them a convenient way to make contact.

By bridging online and offline marketing worlds, these technologies supercharge your traditional direct mailing campaigns, and give your target market a way to take advantage of tools they already use every day—packaged in a familiar and time-honored form.

When combined with inbound marketing methods, direct mail marketing results become easier to measure and more agile to manage. This integration of inbound and outbound marketing offers your business a simple and effective way to reach those most likely to make a purchase. And, it can do so from anywhere, even while your customers are on the go.

Direct mail initiatives for your Denver business can make a lot of sense. A direct mail marketing service like DBC can pull it all together for you, and help you reach your goals using your customers’ favorite old-school mode of communication (with a little help from cutting-edge online marketing technology)!

Conclusions?

What do you think the impact of traditional techniques on more modern inbound marketing can have on your business? Does it make sense to try to use the best of both approaches? Is the benefit of traditional marketing worth the expense even when combined with inbound marketing’s advantages?

Categories : INTERNET MARKETING, WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT

Posted by DBC Digital on

March 12, 2012

Inbound Marketing: Using “Hot” Trending Keywords

Maximizing “Trending” opportunities

Here’s a quick tip for Denver-area marketers to get some extra mileage out of hot “trending” topics for your inbound marketing efforts.

Hot, hot, hot!

All major search engines favor content that is fresh and that focuses on highly-trending keyword phrases. You can use this search engine focus to help grow your website’s popularity and your blog’s visibility.

For example, let’s say you are a natural green grocer and that a famous movie star loses 45 pounds on a diet solely of mixed greens. The story hits the newsstands, and suddenly everyone is searching for “mixed greens diet”.

If you knew that, you could add a few articles to your website and blog about the mixed greens diet. The search engines would see that you are providing content about that trend and quickly move you up in the rankings. You’d get a nice burst of traffic.

If only there were some way to check on trending phrases… hmmm

Using Google Trends

Oh, but wait, there is! It’s called “Google Trends.” Go to http://www.google.com/trends/ Type in any phrase and you will see whether search volumes are rising or falling for that phrase. The report even shows specific new stories and whether they affected search volumes.

The top part of the graph you will see is the Search Volume Index, the rise or fall in searches for that phrase. The bottom graph is the News References Volume, which tells you the amount of online media mentions for the phrase.

You can get more advanced reporting at www.google.com/insights/search/ (including seasonality, geography and categories).

You can also see the list of the top 100 hot phrases by clicking the “More Hot Searches” link.

Other Media

It also pays to stay current on TV, radio and print news. If a relevant story seems to be gaining a lot of ground, work it into your website and blog.

For instance, if you see on the news that Frank Bigstar is the movie star who lost 45 pounds on the mixed greens diet, you could mention his name here and there in your blog. Chance are that other readers watching the news will remember Frank’s name and diet, but probably not mixed greens. If you show up for “Frank Bigstar diet,” you’re set.

A word of caution: Be sure you look at whether the keyword phrase you are considering is really relevant to your business. For example, while mixed greens could mean for salad, it could also mean mixed green paint. After you identify a keyword, test it by putting it in Google and see what comes up. Make sure you don’t see a bunch of equally correct but totally irrelevant meanings ranking higher in the search results.

At the same time, remember that no keyword is 100 percent relevant. If more than half of the resulting “long-tail” phrases using that word are relevant to your business, you probably have a winner.

Categories : INTERNET MARKETING, SEO

Posted by DBC Digital on

March 8, 2012

Inbound Marketing: The 5 Best Metrics for Your Website

We had a Denver-based client call us the other day to tell us how very excited they were because they got 500 “hits” on their new catalog page. We gently told them that while that was great, unfortunately, hits are almost meaningless when it comes to measuring your audience or your site’s Inbound Marketing performance.

That’s because a simple way to define a “hit” is any one file downloaded from your Website, any one time. Every image, script, and stylesheet linked to a page counts as one file, and, as a result, one hit. Since a page can contain 1 file or 1,000 files, hits don’t tell you much from a marketing viewpoint.

Look at the image above which shows a single Web page. That page, though, holds dozens of images. If you do some quick math, you can see that a single view of that page would generate over 50 hits. If only ten people visit that page, that would be 500 hits. (Wow!)

For a lot of other reasons, tracking “hits” is important (server load, speed-of-page load, etc.) but not from an inbound marketing perspective.

The best true measures of your inbound marketing progress are going to be the following:

Sessions (or visits): A session is any one person visiting your Web site any one time. If I visit your site ten times in a week, my visits count as ten sessions, whether I stayed on your site for 1 minute or 50.
Unique visitors: A unique visitor is any one person visiting your Web site any number of times during a specific period. If I visit your site ten times in a week, I still count as only one unique visitor.
Page views: A pageview is any one visitor viewing one page of your site, one time. A page must have a unique address, or URL. If I visit your homepage but then click a link and visit contactus.html, those are two pageviews.
Time on site: This is the total amount of time one visitor spends on your site in the course of a single session. Average time on site is a very important measure of visit quality and interest.
Referrers: If you click a link on a Google results page and land on your site, then Google is the referrer.

Any traffic-reporting toolset you use must provide these five metrics. If yours doesn’t, it’s time to get a new toolset.

There are other important measures you need to keep an eye on as well (back links, etc.) and we’ll talk about those on a later post, but these 5 are the Big 5.

Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC Digital, a marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound (internet) marketing, Greg helps mid-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.

You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com

Categories : INTERNET MARKETING, WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT

Posted by DBC Digital on

February 16, 2012

4 Social Media Myths BUSTED!

Daniel Zarrella, Social media Scientist with HubSpot, is a specialist in web development for social media marketing and uses his passion to study social media behavior from a data-heavy position. http://danzarrella.com/bio#

A few days ago, Dan held a webinar on “The Science of Social Media” for Denver-area marketers where he addressed some of the more common myths surrounding social media:

Myth #1 – “Ideas go viral because they are worthy”

Not so. Sometimes it’s just plain luck that turns a blog, video or social media post into viral marketing material. Dan does say, however, that there are 5 points that will increase the likelihood that your post will go viral;

Reach – this is where pure numbers of connections, friends and followers play a big part. The larger the number of social networking connections (friends and followers), the more people will read your marketing content and increase your exposure.
Attention – If your post is memorable, humorous, or in some way can stand out from the crowd, you will get the attention of your readers.
Style – use a natural style when you write you posts. Simple and straightforward. You are writing to inform, not compete in a literary contest.
Upbeat—stay positive and avoid negative issues. Stories of encouragement and support work the best.
Motivation— how do you motivate your social networking connections to share your content? One, make it simple to do so. (For instance, include social networking buttons on your page).If you have written marketing content that is positive and informative, it is more likely to get shared.

Myth #2– “Engaging in conversations is the most important thing on Social Media”

According to Dan’s data, marketers with the most social networking contacts are not usually the one’s with the most conversations on-line. it is the marketers who pass along the most valuable links that will have a lot more followers.

As well, lots of Facebook conversations doesn’t result in lots infulence, publishing interesting content works better by far!

Myth #3 – “Don’t call yourself a guru”

In fact, people that refer to themselves with an authority title (such as “Author of,” “Guru,” “Official,” “Speaker,” “Founder,” or “Expert” buiold and an average 100 to 200 more followers on Twitter than those who don’t. The take-away here is that social networking contacts will follow you more frequently when you identify yourself as an expert.

But a word of caution. Dan has also found that when marketers talk just about themselves and how great they are, they will have fewer social networking contacts.

Myth #4 – “Friday, Saturday and Sunday are bad days to publish content or send out emails”

Email click-through rates are higher during the week-end. And people tend to “share” more posts during the weekend. (But I believe this weekend activity is targeted more toward the consumer side of marketing rather than the B2B side, but you be the judge.)

Bonus tip:

Finally, Dan shares the fact that “requests” for the readers to take some sort of action (“Please re-tweet this,” etc.) do work. If you ask nicely and don’t do it all the time, your readers will respond, so especially don’t forget “calls-to-action.” Also, posts that include the word ‘comment’ in them – do get more comments.

So, as always, thank you for re-tweeting (or linking to this) and please comment below!

Thanks!

Categories : INTERNET MARKETING

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