Marketing

Marketing is an integrated communications-based process through which individuals and communities discover that existing and newly-identified needs and wants may be satisfied by the products and services of others.

Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. The term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to market, as in shopping, or going to a market to buy or sell goods or services.

Marketing practice tends to be seen as a creative industry, which includes advertising, distribution and selling. It is also concerned with anticipating the customers' future needs and wants, which are often discovered through market research. Seen from a systems point of view, sales process engineering views marketing as a set of processes that are interconnected and interdependent with other functions, whose methods can be improved using a variety of relatively new approaches.

Marketing is influenced by many of the social sciences, particularly psychology, sociology, and economics. Anthropology and neuroscience are also small but growing influences. Market research underpins these activities. Through advertising, it is also related to many of the creative arts. The marketing literature is also infamous for re-inventing itself and its vocabulary according to the times and the culture.

5 Ways to Market Your Small Business Online

As small businesses naturally don’t have the necessary resources to launch huge marketing campaigns, they will have to compensate this with resourcefulness and innovation. If you’re running a small business and you’re searching for cost-efficient marketing solutions, here’s how you can use the wonderful World Wide Web to your company’s advantage.

5 Ways to Market Your Small Business Online:

Build a Website - You don’t have to pay for web hosting even if you’re running a commercial website just as long as your company can be properly categorized as a small business. Having a company website is the means for prospective customers to learn everything they have to know about the products or services you’re offering. Compared to other online media, a website allows your customers to see and hear about your offer and perhaps interact with you as well.

Know about SEO - Your work doesn’t start and end with building a website. To make your website work as a marketing tool for your business, you need to incorporate SEO - or search engine optimization - elements in it. SEO can help your website zoom to the top of search engine rankings and provide it with all the exposure you need.

In regard to SEO, make sure that you focus on your design and content. Besides needing your website layout to be visually attractive, it must also have easily located links to facilitate navigation. Use HTML as much as possible as this is more SEO friendly than, say, CSS. As for the content, refresh or update it as much as you can because new information will always encourage old and new readers to visit your website. Also, think about the appropriate keywords for your website and use them as much as possible - without committing grammatical errors or ruining the coherence of your content - to delight search engine spiders all the more.

Have a Blog - A blog is one of the most effective online marketing tools today, and if you don’t have one yet then you’re wasting a huge opportunity day after day. A blog allows you to directly interact with prospective customers and almost immediately update them with anything new about your company’s products or services.

To increase the marketing effectiveness of your blog, make sure that you’re writing about one topic alone. This topic must be directly related to your company’s products or services. Furthermore, it must be something that you know and love a lot to enable you to write in a convincing and interesting fashion.

Build Your Network Contacts - Although websites sometimes seem to be creatures of their own right, always remember that a website can’t really operate by itself. It gets updated and achieves success because of its webmaster or owner, and that person should be the one you’re concentrating on getting friendly with. Do your best to build your network by establishing good working relationships with other website owners. This is a give and take situation so be ready and willing to shell out as many favors as you hope to receive. As you become good buddies with these people, you’ll end up exchanging links, and this, by the way, is called affiliate marketing.

Join Podcasts - Although the popularity of blogs is certainly not waning, that doesn’t mean you have to completely rely on blog marketing alone. There are other marketing fishes in the Internet, and one of them goes by the name of podcasting. Make new podcasts regularly and insert your ads in between. You have to make them short and interesting enough to discourage your listeners from wasting energy just to press the fast forward button.

The Truth about Effective Marketing

Whether you’re starting a new business or attempting to grow an existing one, it’s easy to spin your wheels when it comes to effective marketing. Often times, business owners will try to make a big splash by running a large ad in a local newspaper or a television commercial during the most expensive time slot. While these will probably be seen, they probably won’t have much impact because there is often no repetition. The business owner runs them once (or a few times) and then simply stops with the conclusion that advertising doesn’t work. In order to achieve results from any form of advertising, you need repetition of your message. This has always been true, but it’s even more important with the number of marketing messages that today’s consumers are presented each day.

If you’re ready to start marketing your business, begin with the basic building blocks to form your foundation and grow from there.

Network — many networking events can be found in just about any city or town. If you, like most business owners, are short on time, focus on the ones that are during the evening hours. In many cases, these events are free, so the only cost is your time. Networking is a great way to make face to face contact with prospects without the distractions you would normally face during the work day. All you need is a handful of business cards, a winning smile and a great attitude.

Business cards — Obviously, you’ll need them for networking and sales calls. Don’t forget all the other ways you can distribute them. Business cards a an easy and inexpensive way to generate exposure for your business.

Direct mail — You don’t need to mail to a list of 50,000 for direct mail to be effective, you just need to be consistent. You can have 1,000 postcards printed, affix postage and labels yourself, and mail out 50 or 100 to the same targeted list each week. As you begin to generate revenue from this, you can increase the size of your mailing list.

Web site — If you don’t have a web site, you are wrong. Plain and simple. Web sites aren’t just for e commerce, nor are they just for large companies. These days, people use the internet for comparing companies and without a web site, you’re out of the running. You don’t need all of the bells and whistles, but you do need an effective and professional web site.

There you have it. The basic building blocks you’ll need to effectively market your business. With these blocks in place, you can begin to add additional things, such as search engine optimization, television and radio advertising, or billboards. The idea is to build a foundation, and as you achieve results, add more to your marketing campaign.

Getting the Most out of Google AdSense

#10 Contextual Ads Preview/Comparison Tool

This tool is helpful in comparing AdSense ads to those of other advertisement vendors (Chitika, Yahoo). You also have the ability to customize the colors and view what ads a certain URL would be likely to display. It’s a pretty solid tool when planning what type of advertisements you want to put on your page (especially if you are trying to decide which vendor to sign up with).

#9 Blacklist

The Blacklist basically gives you a list of AdWord publishers that have very low payouts. It is a fact that ad space is valuable– I would rather fill my ad space with 3 publishers offering $0.50 per click than 3 publishers offering 1 or 2 cents. By providing a list of provider domains to avoid, you can filter your ads and have a greater chance of having high-paying publisher ads displayed on your site. According its website, Blacklist works by:

“…providing you with list of most commonly filtered websites whose webmasters use AdWords to attract visitors for low price click so they can convert it to high price click on their own MFA (Made for AdSense) site(s). In order to STOP these type of actions going on your sites, all you need to do is to paste our specially generated list to your AdSense Setup -> Competitive Ad Filter list. Your revenue should substantially increase.”

Nuff said.

#8 AdSense Calculator

This is one of my favorite tools– it allows you to quickly calculate how much you can make given daily impressions, CTR, and CPC. Although it’s certainly easy to calculate the values yourself, this is a resource you can use to quickly get that info. It computes daily, monthly, and yearly data for both clicks and earnings.

From their website:

“It also serves as a tool that will allow Google AdSense users to take their current statistics and get an idea of how much they can expect to see daily, monthly and yearly. As well as those who are considering implementing AdSense on their site what results they are likely to see.”

For those out there who like to speculate (”hmmm, if I had 3000 impressions and a CTR of 2% and average CPC of 30 cents, what could I make…?”) this is THE tool for you– quick, simple, and easy to use.

#7 AdSense Sandbox

“This is a handy little utility if you would like to see what sort of Google AdSense ads are based on content or keywords. “

This tool lets you see LOTS of ads that Adsense may be displaying on a site. Why is this good? Simply put, you can look at ads that show up for your competitor’s site. And why is THAT good? You can use it to help out your own ad campaign.

For example, I know Plenty of Fish (the free dating site with the ugly site design) makes a TON of money from ads. Since my site, UpHook, is in the same general category, I can look at what ads are showing up for them and see if those same sites show up on mine. If not, then I know I’m not really competing against them; and I also know that their ads are probably worth more per-click than my ads. In addition, this also gives me a list of what websites I may be competing against. And keeping an eye on one’s competition is a smart move.

#6 Adsense Preview Tool (explorer)

This tool is very similar to the Sandbox. The difference is that you can generate a preview of what ads may be displayed on a page much easier. Rather than visiting a website, you can bring up a pop-up window full of ad samples by right clicking and selecting the preview tool from the pop-up window.

The upside: It’s easy to access and gives good information (see Tool #7)

The downside: It’s for Internet Explorer

#5 Adsense Notifier (firefox)

This is an invaluable too for OC people who check adsense stats every 5 minutes. Checking adsense habitually is a painful process—its like watching grass grow. But this handy little extension makes it less of a headache. The Notifier can sit in the bottom of your browser window and displays whatever stats you want– total clicks, daily earnings, impressions, CTR, etc. Wondering if you made any more money yet? You can find out with a quick glance. It’s highly configurable and can save you bunch of time.

#4 Competitive Ads Filter

Now we’re getting to the heavy hitters. This tool is actually part of the Adsense setup manager, so you have to already have an AdSense account to use it. You can use the ad filter to block specific ads from appearing on your pages. Simply give the filter a list of URLs and they are effectively prevented from displaying on your site/blog. This can be useful for a few reasons:

1- You can prevent competition form advertising on your site. This could directly benefit from you by helping to ensure that people stay on your site and not jump on the first ad offering the same thing your site does. Due to the targeted-advertisement nature of AdSense, if you have a service site there is a good chance that your competition will have ads showing up on your site all the time. For example, all the ads that show up on my site (free personals, etc) are for other sites offering dating and personals and matchmaking, etc. For some people this is bad– but for others it can be a good thing.

2- You can prevent irrelevant ads from being displayed. I mentioned this in a previous blog post– there are some cases where you want to get rid of ads that don’t really correlate well with your site content. Remember, AdSense is just a software system– it tries to determine what ads to serve up based on some site content. There is a chance that it can guess wrong. And when that happens, you can use the filter to help correct things. Have a site about dogs being cooler than cats but AdSense shows a bunch of ads about pro-cat books? Just chug the bogus cat sites into the filter and you’ll be all set.

3- You can block publishers that have low-paying ads. This is helpful in making sure you get the best value for your space. Using the Blacklist tool to get a list of low-paying publishers and plugging their domains into your competitive ads filter can quite possibly earn you more money in the long run.

These are all good uses for the filter, however, there is a drawback to using this tool– if you are trying to filter entire groups of content by using the filter, you will only see temporary results. As more sites pop up, you will likely have to keep updating the filter. This is why this tool is best suited for blocking sites that are in direct competition with yours.

#3 Word Tracker

I know some people who swear by this tool. Although you have to sign up to get unlimited access to the service, the trial will probably give provide enough useful information for you to enhance your AdSense experience. Word Tracker pretty much tells you how often people search for a specific keyword. It can also estimate how many competing sites use those keywords. This is probably the best tool to use before deciding what content to include on your page. If there are a lot of competitors, it may be better to target one of the less-searched-for words. Chances are, you will be able to get indexed higher in a search engine for those terms as opposed to going head-to-head with the competition for the popular words.

Obviously, this can drive traffic to your site. Users are more likely to visit matches that show up within the first 2 or 3 pages of a Google search than they are to visit matches on page 87. Why not opt for being indexed in the first 1-50 matches? Sure, you will get less searches overall, but you will be much more visible.

According to their website:

“Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client’s business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors.”

This tool is can be used for things other than AdSense. However, it just so happens that popular search keywords are also popular AdSense keywords. Go figure.

#2 Overture Bidding Tool

This tool gives you both suggested keywords AND sample bid amounts given a target word. Although Overture is NOT the same as AdSense, the keywords are almost the same as those suggested when signing up for an AdSense account. In addition, I’ve found that the bids listed are pretty darn close to those offered by AdWords publishers. Using this tool, it would be trivial to build a list of high-paying keywords that you would want to make sure you use in your content.

If you ensure that mostly high-paying ads are displayed on your site, you will be getting the most out of your ad space. Think about it– a user isn’t going to know how much each ad is worth before they click it. They are likely to click on almost any ad that appeals to them. Why not make sure that those ads will pay the most money? Using the Overture bidding tool to get other suggested keywords is also useful– however, be careful not to saturate your page content with a bunch of keywords. This can make your site/blog look tacky. A few here and there should be enough for the AdSense spider to throw up high-paying ads. Combined with the Blacklist, this is an excellent tool to use as an alternative to the AdWords Bidding Tool.

#1 AdWords Bidding Tool/Traffic Estimator

This is probably the most useful tool out there. The only drawback is that you must have an AdWords account to get access to the information. I would suggest getting AdWords anyway, since it gives you a good idea of what publishers go through and what options they have when creating ads.

This bidding tool is THE resource for figuring out what keywords result in the highest paying AdSense ads. It’s quite possible that all those pages and blogs that list the Top X-number of highest paying AdSense keywords use the bidding information found through AdWords or Overture. As a site/blog owner, its important to know what words you might want to emphasize in your content.

The traffic estimator will take a set of keywords and tell you the estimated average CPC based on current publisher bidding statistics. Knowing that the estimated CPC of my keywords can pull ads paying between $3 and $8 on average, I know that I am in a very good position to make money from my AdSense advertising. Although these CPCs are average values, and I’m sure Google will only show those ads on very well-performing sites, it at least lets me know what I have to look forward to when I start bringing in a larger amount of traffic.

Top 5 Pay Per Click Marketing Campaign Tips

Learn 5 Pay per Click marketing campaign tips and get a great start with your paid search marketing goals.

Trying to make an educated decision on what keywords for this Pay per Click campaign to use and of course pay for down the line. These days it is so easy to upload funds into the account and start running campaigns. There are a few points to remember when running Pay per Click marketing campaigns. Knowing them will keep you from wasting money.

1. Choose the Best Keywords

The wrong keywords will deliver hits that do not convert. Traffic is not what you want. You want sales and profit.

Stay away from too popular keywords with large traffic statistics. Avoid multiple word keywords. These get a lot of traffic; but not a lot of sales. With the wrong keywords, you could waste your budget in less than 24 hours.

Choose specific keywords relevant to what you are offering. The more specific the keywords are the less money you are wasting for traffic that does not convert.

2. Do not Bid on the First Spot

This tip is mainly to save on the marketing budget. The number one spot does get most of the traffic but is not necessary the most profitable. It is certainly the most expensive. Most browsers shop as we shop in stores. They will click on other spots besides the first one.

3. Write Ads that Attract Customers, Not Browsers

With the right ad, you will get the right visitor, and a sale. It is not about writing clever ads and having much PPC real estate on search engines. After all traffic is not what you seek when you are paying for it. You want to attract visitors that turn into customers. Write ads for those visitors not for the mass traffic.

4. Make Your Landing Page Convert into Profit

Do not send PPC traffic, traffic that you pay for to your home page. With only a few exceptions, the home page is never the relevant landing page. A “landing page” is the website page that you send people to once they click your PPC advertisement.

Send browsers to the page that matches the search more. If it is a product search, send them to the exact product page, a service to the appropriate service. You want the browser not to look for what they left the search engine for.

5. Track your Conversions, Not your traffic

You want to know which keywords are profitable for you and which keywords are wasting marking dollars.

There are keywords in your campaign that are making you money and there are keywords that are wasting your money. By tracking conversions (leads or sales), by keyword, you’ll be more profitable.

These Pay per Click marketing tips are to avoid most common beginners mistakes. If these common mistakes can be avoided, you the advertiser will have better chances to succeed.

Marketing Services

Marketing consultants create and execute complete marketing and communications strategies for our clients. Our professional marketing expertise, combined with our fully customizable suite of services, gives you unparalleled leverage and advantage in your overall online presence, and in your targeted marketing and advertising strategies.

The value to our clients is a service provided by our marketing consultants with the knowledge, and experience, to leverage solutions and resources through all phases of a project. Using innovative marketing techniques, we produce result driven marketing campaigns for our clients.

A strong online marketing campaign such as Search Engine Optimization equals traffic, more sales, a better bottom line, and dramatic ROI. Or a Pay Per Click marketing campaign faster results and your Internet marketing investment will continue to pay off with impressive results!

Internet Strategy Development

Search Engine Optimization

Media Planning & Buying

Cost Per Click Management

Web Tracking Reports

What can advertising do for your business? Advertising can increase your sales or change your customers' perceptions for example. Think catalogs, newsletters, magazines, newspapers, TV, radio, packaging, postcards, brochures and much more.

Advertising Design

Newspaper Advertising

Radio & Television

Billboard & Transit

Direct Marketing

Advertising is often times the core of the integrated marketing communications strategy. Through imaginative planning and savvy use of media tools available, we have converted advertising into successful marketing campaigns. Our experienced and professional marketing consultants will work with you to identify your business opportunities and marketing needs to deliver the right results.

Advertising

Before you can advertise effectively, you need to answer these important questions.

Q: What do you think is a better advertising plan: $2,000 in direct postcards reaching roughly 3,500 people, or $2,000 in a newspaper ad reaching 750,000 readers?

A: It depends entirely on what you say in your ad. If your impact quotient is high enough, your best bet will be the newspaper. If the direct postcards are delivered precisely to “the perfect target” (which is not very likely), then the direct-mail route is preferable.

Based on the fact that I don’t know the answers to either of these questions, my guess is that neither the direct postcards nor the newspaper will work for you. My advice is that you keep your $2,000 in your pocket until you come up with an actual plan. These are the hard questions you need to answer:

1. What do you have to say that matters to your customer? I’m your prospective customer. I know you want my business, but why should I care? What’s in it for me? Most ads are written under the assumption that the reader, listener or viewer has a basic level of interest and is paying close attention to the ad. But customers tend to ignore all ads that do not speak directly to them. Your first task is not media selection; it’s message selection.

2. Can you say it persuasively? Most ads are ineffective because the writer was trying to say too much, include too much and be too much. Fearful of leaving someone out, these writers write vague, all-encompassing ads that speak specifically to no one. “We Fix Cars” is a terrible headline for an ad.

3. Are you speaking to a felt need? Let’s say the “We Fix Cars” auto mechanic has a great deal of affection for older BMW 2002s. He knows that 2002 owners love their cars like few drivers on the road and that the only weakness of the 2002 is its evil Solex carburetor. Every 2002 owner knows this, too. So he writes the headline, “BMW 2002 Owners: Aren’t You Tired of Fooling With That Solex by Now?” In the body of the ad, he talks about the fabulous new Weber two-barrel carburetor now available for BMW 2002s, raves about how it dramatically increases performance and reliability, explains that he keeps these new Weber carburetors in stock at his shop, then names the price at which he will install and adjust that carburetor for you. He closes the ad by saying, “You’ll rocket out of here in a completely different BMW than the one you drove in.” If a list of BMW owners in your area is available for a direct-mail card (such as the list from the local BMW club), then a direct-mail card or flier would be the way to go. But if no such list is available, the newspaper might be a second choice. In either case, you’d want to include a large picture of a BMW 2002 to serve as a recall cue and help gain the attention of your target customer.

4. How long is your time horizon? Some ads build traffic, some build relationships and others build your reputation. If you don’t have the financial resources to launch a true branding campaign focused on building relationships and reputation among potential customers, you’re going to have to settle for traffic-building ads until you can afford to begin developing your brand. To what degree do you have financial staying power?

5. What is the urgency of your message? If you need an ad to produce immediate results, your offer must have a time limit. This technique will simultaneously work for and against you. On one hand, customers tend to delay what can be delayed, so limited-time offers generate traffic more quickly since the threat of “losing the opportunity” is real. On the other hand, customers have no memory of messages that have expired; short-term messages are erased from our brains immediately. Therefore, it’s extremely difficult to create long-term awareness with a series of limited-time-offer, short-term ads.

6. What is the impact quotient of your ad? How good your ad must be depends on the quality of your competitors’ ads. A .22-caliber pistol is a weapon against an opponent with a peashooter. But aim that pathetic pistol at an opponent holding a machine gun, and you can kiss your silly butt goodbye. How powerful is the message of the opposition? If your competitor carries a machine gun, don’t go where he goes. In other words, don’t use the media he uses.

7. How long is the purchase cycle? How long it will take your advertising to pay off is tied to the purchase cycle of your product. Ads for restaurants work more quickly than ads for sewing machines, because a larger percentage of people are looking for a good meal today than are looking for a machine that will let them make their own clothes. Likewise, an ad for a product we buy twice per year will produce results faster than an ad for a product we buy only once a year. Remember, a customer first has to be exposed to your ad often enough to remember it, then you have to wait for that customer to need what you sell. How soon will he or she likely need it?