Marketing Articles

freezelight : flickr

Large email marketers are in the business of high volume email marketing. This is a natural progression just as in other forms of business when a business reaches a point where it has to scale up support operations. Every online business that has a good product to sell has to be ready for this. This does pose some challenges, however. There are very few cases of a good marketer on the internet being able to scale up slowly. A good product will sometimes elicit such a massive response that you would have to scale up your operations to such a level that you might find it difficult to get your infrastructure and resources to keep up. In email marketing, there is an additional challenge that you have to face after your infrastructure to deal with high volumes is in place. This is the challenge of dealing with the consequence if sending high volumes of email. Most entities could end up with spammer tag if there is no structure or thought put into spamming practices.

Spam detection is done by spam filters. These are software that uses complex mathematics to find patterns in the mails that a user marks as spam. This means that the software actually learns from the user how to identify spam. There are also some preset values that the coding of this software comes equipped with. Large email marketers have to first understand how these software work and before starting high volume email marketing.

Content is the first thing that you have to be careful about when sending emails. When you look at your own email inbox, you can tell which mails are obviously spam because of the way that the content is framed. The governing rule for proper content is to not use the same words or set of words continuously in an email.

 

Building a website brand requires both careful planning and execution. The following is a list of tips that are important to implement when creating and maintaining a Website brand online.

1. Choose a domain name that is short and memorable.

Finding a good domain name requires some research. It is vital to come up with something that is both short and catchy. Time spent on this is well worth it since getting the domain name right will make it easier for your customers to remember you.

2. Give an incentive to returning customers in the form of new and relevant content.

We try to stress the importance of fresh content on a regular basis for search engine rankings, but even more important than that is reaching out to your customers on topics that matter to them. Small businesses often create excellent blogs in order to increase the correspondence between them and their customers.

3. Design a simple, easy to use website.

Presenting a web site that is highly animated, requires a download of additional software, or enables viewing of the page only for a specific browser, limits the amount of people who can access your website. It is hard enough to bring new visitors to a web site. It is imperative to make their experience a positive one.

4. Go “live” only when your site is ready.

If your content is not ready, you are better off waiting until it is than putting a “coming soon” sign. The association one would make from such a notification will seriously harm thereputation you are trying to create.

5. The website has to look professional.

This is an important one: In e-commerce, all the customer can go by is the appearance of a website. While it is cheaper to hire an amateur designer, the result will most likely not be sending out the right message. Once the site is up it is important to keep the topics professional even if it represents a small business. Personal photos do not belong anywhere on your professional website. Displaying photos from your recent fishing trip on your business website can hurt your branding efforts.

TheTruthAbout... : flickr

You may have noticed a lot of coverage over the past couple of years about the rapid growth of social networks and how they are changing the way we communicate?

Perhaps, you have also stumbled across one of the many articles professing how to ‘double your sales’ with Twitter or Facebook and maybe feel you have missed the boat with your own marketing?

But, it’s actually worth asking the question as to whether marketing through social media actually works in the first place, and, if it does, how can you make it work for your business?

The Changing Face Of The Web

Many social media web sites have been built on the back of a technical evolution on the Internet – something paraphrased as “Web 2.0”. It’s a term that many marketers talk about with great authority and it is used in many different contexts. But, what exactly is it?

In the early days of the Internet, a website contained words and pictures - like a magazine or brochure - and it wasn’t an interactive environment. But, with the advent of Blogging, Wikis and commenting (to name but a few) we can all get involved with conversations online by writing (and publishing) directly onto web pages.

We can easily create our own Facebook profiles, Blogs and Twitter accounts and share information with people who have similar interests. For this reason, Web 2.0 is often referred to as the read/write web.

Of course, one of the main reasons social networking has become mainstream so quickly is that many of the websites don’t charge – they are free to use. Companies looking to raise their profile online have taken advantage of this to promote their profile to a whole new audience, often in an inappropriate way.

When it comes to marketing your business through social networks, are people even talking about your brand in the first place? Are they discussing your industry? If so, where are those conversations taking place so you can join in and raise your profile too?

Getting Specific

As with most marketing case studies, many of the success stories you will read about are consumer brands; brands that people want to talk about; brands with a mass market.

From this feedback, companies from all sorts of industries have picked up on the buzz and started Twittering, Blogging and setting up their Facebook fan groups, and, because the cost of entry is virtually zero, it’s not just the big boys. Startups and small businesses have also jumped on the bandwagon.

Move into the business-to-business space and getting your voice heard becomes somewhat harder than the success stories suggested it would be. Who wants to talk about widgets or your bespoke niche service, especially when so many other companies occupy the same space? It’s like exhibiting at a huge trade show with all your competitors setting up a stand right next to you.

Interestingly though, some people do want to talk about the same thing as you and may be interested in hearing what your company has to say. The key is to find out where the most appropriate conversation is taking place and to then to understand how that conversation is taking place.

Did you know that 90% of all Guaranteed traffic companies are selling fake traffic? They use a special PHP software that routes HTTP get requests through a massive list of anonymous proxy servers or IP addresses. If you are tracking your hits, your tracking log will show that you received a hit from a particular IP address when in fact, the hit came from one of the anonymous or fake IP addresses the script stores in a database.

All the traffic sent by the fake traffic PHP script is unique and shows up as unique in the stats the company provides you. This is why they can promise you that your site will receive unique visitors. You can go to any search engine and type in the keyword phrase "Software that sends fake hits" and you will be shocked at what they are selling to these traffic companies.

We tested several traffic companies and the results were very poor. We will not mention the scam companies we tested (because of legal concerns), but we are certain that they are using this type of software to produce hits. So, before you go and waste your money, here is a list of the things to watch out for:

• A company that will sells you 100,000 visitors for only $39.99.
   
• A company that claims they can send 1,000,000 visitors to your site within 30 days or less.
   
• A company that claims their visitors are ALL unique visitors (meaning a particular visitor will only visit your site once for the entire duration of your campaign).
   
• A company that claims to have a long list of targeted categories for you to choose from. There are more indicators of a scam traffic company, but I think you get the picture.

Ian Muttoo :flickr

INTRODUCTION

Indian retail sector is highly fragmented as compared to the developed as well as the other developing countries. This shows a great potential for the organized retail industry to prosper in India, as the market for the final consumption in India is very large. Retail trade is largely in the hands of private independent owners and distributor’s structure for fast moving consumer goods consisting of multiple layers such as carrying and forwarding agents, distributors, stockiest, wholesalers and retailers. Thus, the growth potential for the organized retailer is enormous. In the next 2-3 years, India will finally see operations of a number of very serious international players- net withstanding the current restrictions on FDI in retail.

The Indian retail sector is ready to take on challenges from global retail players such as Wal-mart and Carrefour because unlike them, they have a better understanding of the Indian consumer’s psyche. Ultimately, a successful retailer is one who understands his customer. The Indian customer is looking for an emotional connection, a sense of belonging. Hence, to be successful any retail outlet has to be localized. The customer should feel that it is a part of his culture, his perceived values, and does not try to impose alien values or concepts on him. Indian customer is not keen to buy something just because it is sold by an international company.

PRESENT SCENARIO

Retailing in India is witness to the boom in terms of modern retailing formats, shopping malls etc. the future of retailing for any product across the country will definitely be in malls where the consumer can get variety, quality and ambience.

However, in spite of this continuous debate to be or not to be, recently Government has allowed up to 51 percent FDI in single brand retailing by foreign companies like Reebok and Louis Vuiton. As of now, single brand retailers operate through the franchisee route and there is a strong view that FDI in this segment would not displace jobs or impact the local industry but help create employment.

Even today the government is undecided about the level FDI in retail, but a number of foreign players, including the Wal-mart stores, Inc., have announced their intention to enter India in a big way. At present Wal-mart is operating through its subsidiary in Bangalore, which was functioning as a liaison office till last year. Now it is in the process of setting up offices in New Delhi and Mumbai.

Spencer E Holtaway : flickr

Most of know by now that Twitter is the flavour of the year, and a lot of you will be starting to use Twitter for the very first time, and using it correctly to build your following, to get your followers to go where you want them to and to get buy in from them is not easy,even though there’s lot of people using the micro blogging service, you still need to have a plan to get the most out of the site. For those of you who have been using Twitter for awhile, this article will also help you get more response for all your efforts.

To be successful using Twitter you need to offer value to those following you, and you need to create what I call the “Trusted Adviser” role for yourself, once you have created this role and others see your expertise on a subject, they will follow you to get information and advice, but first you need to work very hard to create this persona.

Creating your Tweet plan and then following the strategy you have set up for yourself, will help you keep you focused. Just posting tweets about your product or listing is not engaging your followers nor is it creating value, it is just plain boring.

Setting out to become a trusted adviser means you need to listen,respond, broadcast and build your community, that’s what your followers are, your community, and you need to offer value in what you do to get engagement from them.

Creating a topic list is a good place to start, define your area of expertise and start to build that trust.

luc legay : flickr

The questions I get asked the most when talking to business owners about a social media strategy, are “Do I need a Social Media Strategy?” or “Is it valuable for my business?”, and these are questions that you as a business owner should ask, because there are ramifications on you and your staff when you embark on social media.

Your office culture is a big factor in the success of a social media strategy, because social media in itself is about sharing, and if any of your staff are not willing to share information, then it makes it a lot harder to get buy in from them, it also impacts on their time, and if you run a busy office, this can be a real issue in getting your strategy off the ground. There are also other priorities that come up, but that is a different story for another time, so let’s get back to the original reason for this post.

There’s a great quote from Seth Godin that I’d like to share with you about social networking.

“Networking is always important when it’s real and it’s always a useless distraction when it’s fake. What the Internet has allowed is an enormous amount of fake networking to take place.”

One of the biggest mistakes that most businesses make when they start a social media strategy, is to self promote.It’s very tempting to push your service and product or tell everyone how good you are straight away. You suddenly have this new marketing tool available to you and you’re going to shout out your strengths from the rooftops.