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5 Quick Online Branding Tips
Targeting – Your advertising should appeal to the demographic where you place your ads. Consistent messaging that conveys your the values of your product or service is key to driving recognition or recall for when they’re in a buying mode. Creating top of mind awareness with consistency and repetition can build equity. It’s surprising how often people will think one ad will suffice for all. This isn’t print. You can rotate different creative and run with your best performers.
Reputation Marketing – Staying on top of what you rank for and the conversations around your brand allows you to stay a step ahead, and possibly avoid putting out fires later. If you were to google your brand name, do any of the top ten listings have negative impact? Are you monitoring the dialogue around your brand in social media? If you see negative results in the top 10 listings when searching for your brand, you’ll want to address it before too many customers come across it. Once you have a 5 Star Reputation are you telling the World about it? Does your homepage show recent five star reviews on a regular basis so your prospects can see how great your company is? Do you have a 5 star reputation and use it to close more business? After developing a 5 star reputation you must market that reputation for EVERYONE to see!
Social Media – Engage with your audience. It all sounds easy, but it mostly falls apart in a week or three. While starting with good intentions, other duties call. Most companies don’t have the luxury of hiring a dedicated social media specialist to manage these things, so it usually gets added to the list of tasks an employee needs to do. The best way to manage it is scheduling a block of time at least once or twice a week. Find the medium that suits you, but also look at where your customers are. It’s also recommended to grab your brand name as a username for the bigger sites like youtube, facebook, twitter, flickr, technorati, ning, delicious, yelp, scribd, and others.
Search Engine Optimization – Companies searching for your brand name obviously know of you already, but what about the ones searching for the products or services your offer? These are targeted prospects, often in buying mode. Many companies make the mistake of not including SEO in their marketing strategy. The game has changed, and those that are late will have to work twice as hard to catch up, probably more. SEO is a necessity. One of the essential parts of the SEO process is link building, and this is one place where you can go beyond restrictions to redirect traffic onto your site. Make sure to read up on the thrive global niched guide to know more about link building for niches to get great results for your site or business.Displaying in search engine results for phrases your customers are looking for is an excellent way to build credibility for your brand. Being synonymous with a phrase strengthens that top of mind awareness and would be comparable to branding on steroids. If you’re a customer and searching for a phrase, research shows 42% click the first listing, and 74% of the results clicked are in the top 5 positions. In a recent study, SEO shows to provide the best ROI over all other forms of online marketing.
Search Marketing – If you run an affiliate program and pay for leads, you might consider taking over bids on your brand name in Google Adwords. Why pay more for leads if you own the trademark to your brand name? Run your own campaign for those searching your brand to retain control.
Does Your Company Suffer From “Brand Absence”?
Does Your Company Suffer From “Brand Absence”?
The first level of branding is called “Brand Absence”.
Brand absence – “A company or person who is unknown to his or her target market”.
There are many reasons why you or your company might suffer from Brand Absence:
New company or recently launched business
Lack of marketing
Inconsistent marketing message
Confusion in your marketing
No marketing
No website or website with inconsistent colors and message
As you can see most of the brand absence challenges can be solved by implementing a correct and consistent marketing message.
Stay tuned, I am putting the final touches on a no cost Marketing webinar.
You will learn many proven strategies to increase your brand through marketing.
Up next is “Brand Awareness”…
Borrell Associates Report: Expected Increase in Targeted Display Advertising
Borrell Associates Report: Expected Increase in Targeted Display Advertising
Borrell Associates, an expert in local online advertising, recently published an in-depth report on the automotive industry, paying particular attention to the way the car-buying path has become dramatically shorter. In recent years, digital media has shifted the car buying process, as researching potential car purchases has become increasingly easy and accessible. Now, most consumers perform nearly all of their research online before stepping onto a car dealership lot and, in turn, they are more qualified and prepared to make a purchase when visiting a dealership.
The access to online research has caused serious trouble for traditional media outlets. According to the report, newspapers, broadcast television, and radio advertisements have seen year-over-year declines, while online and mobile advertising increased 18.7%. Borrell Associates explains that the path to purchase has been transformed into a new shape due to the utility and ease of interactive media. Fueled by online research, the use of mobile devices, and brand- and model-specific searches, the typical 6-month buying funnel for purchasing a new car is now a 3-month buying “shot glass”, with more than 70% of the consumers entering the top making a purchase
So how will this affect online advertising? Borrell Associates expects that the auto industry will spend about 20% more on digital advertising this year and two out of five ad dollars will be spent on digital media. In the coming years, targeted display ads and online video will crush all competitive advertising media- even paid search!
In the coming years there will be an explosion of targeted display advertising, including retargeting of users, and online video as marketers transfer their immense success with television advertisements toward online viewing. Specifically, advertisers will have to invest more time and money in moving their video assets online and make them available on mobile and tablet devices. The combination of online video, mobile device usage, and retargeting strategies will allow advertisers to remind their consumers of that gorgeous dark blue sedan wherever they traipse on their smartphones, tablets and PCs.
Why Every Small Business Should Be Using Display Ads
Why Every Small Business Should Be Using Display Ads
Advertising is and always will be one of the most valuable business tools to achieve greater brand visibility and business growth. The problem is traditional avenues such as print and other offline avenues are returning less ROI and less engagement. It is now essential that businesses find ways to reach the audience where they spend their time – online.
Many social media and web based platforms have been working to determine the most effective way to take advantage of the millions (in some cases, billions) of eyes that pass over the web every day.
Pop up and banner ads were introduced as a way to provide a platform for businesses to take advantage of the floods of people that were diverting their attention to online media. But those ads weren’t always deemed effective even by the big brands that had access to these early stage platforms because there was no to control who was seeing the ad making the return on ads run to unqualified buyers extremely poor.
But there’s good news!
Over the past couple of years, online advertising has been growing and maturing to become the most powerful tool for targeting qualified leads and putting your business in front of them. In other words, advertising is a numbers game. It’s all about reaching the most relevant eyes possible with the smallest amount of financial investment.
With today’s digital advertising options, it’s now possible to target ads precisely by demographic, behavioral, and even psychographic information. And even better, you can manage everything using a Hosted ELK as a service and measure the reach and effectiveness of ads with campaign metrics and web
analytics!
Rather than making your ad available to a wide audience and ‘hoping for the best’, you can get your ad in front of a ‘warm’ audience with a HUGE potential for conversion! This makes online display ads infinitely more valuable than any other traditional advertising medium.
So why should you, the local business owner, care?
Targeted display advertising can be focused to a local geographic area down to a 15 mile radius around a zip code. Compared to radio or print advertising which is often spread over 100s of miles, this form of advertising is not only more cost effective but it is PROVEN to generate qualified leads in your area.
But let’s be honest, any new form of advertising is scary so I’m going to let you in on a little secret… The key to taking full advantage of display ads is to create ads that not only gets the word out about your product or service but do so in a way that also enhances your brand image. Your ad has to be created in a way that will convert AND feels valuable and beneficial to your audience. A good display ad is not only creative and eye catching it’s also saying something the audience wants to see or hear.
When done well, the message in a display ad will stick with the members of your audience long after the ad is no longer in view. 35% of people who have seen a display ad will search for the business within 48 hours which is proof that even if someone doesn’t click on a display ad, it is still an effective tool for securing mindshare with your prospects. Visibility is integral to the success of your business. If your audience doesn’t know your business exists, they can’t become customers.
Targeted, online display ads can play a valuable role in the success of your business. But the key to taking full advantage of display ads is truly understanding their role and how to leverage them.
If you’d like to learn about the Lift Local Display Network provided through Summit Marketing, click here.
How To Build A Good Online Marketing Strategy
In today’s market economy, companies must have a good online marketing strategy. With the new technology developments quite a number of companies are going online for their marketing needs. This is due to the fact that the internet is an inexpensive way of doing business especially in advertising and marketing. Do you know why the majority of businesses’ marketing efforts fail? The answer is simple; they don’t have a good online marketing strategy.
When you work online, in everything you do, you need to have a marketing strategy that is outlined and able to be duplicated easily and consistently. The last thing that any company wants is to spend time, money and effort, only to find in the end that it does not work. Even worse is that they don’t even know “why” it didn’t work.
It is very important that you know how things work, why it works and when it is going to work. A lot of people try the social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube as part of their marketing strategies. They also try other strategies like blog posting and article marketing for the purpose of getting more traffic. But none of these work without the total online marketing strategy in place. One piece of the puzzle does not give you what you need to complete it.
In order to be successful with these types of social media marketing efforts, you need to have a really good marketing strategy that will help you understand how and why your marketing works.
Below are tips that you need to do in order to be able to build an effective online marketing strategy.
TIPS ON CREATING AN ONLINE MARKETING STRATEGY
Tip 1
Create/Identify your message
It’s important that your strategy marketing template has a really good keyword in it so that you can be found by your target market when they search for your product or service or problem that you have a “resolution” to.
Tip 2
Pick/Choose your media
You can do reputation marketing, local search marketing, video marketing, article marketing, RSS feeds or bookmark strategies, and even Pod Casting. Just start with one that you are comfortable with and don’t move on to the others until you can develop a good marketing strategy that works for you and your market.
Tip 3
Get your message out to the market place
You can start by syndicating your content through out the social media sites.
Tip 4
Track your message/ traffic
When you create a video, upload them at YouTube, Viddler and all kinds of different video sites. Make sure you track the traffic to see if the strategy is actually working. This is one of the best ways to build an online marketing strategy. If using local search marketing then Google Analytic is another great tracking tool.
For more information about strategies that will help you develop the best online marketing strategy call us at 888.557.1258. And if you want a FREE report to find out where you rank in Google Maps compared to your competition go to: Online Marketing Strategy www.MyLocalSearchRankingReport.com
Online Marketing Videos Improve Conversions
How Online Marketing Videos Improve Conversions
Still not convinced that you need and Video production company and an online video marketing company as part of your marketing campaign? Rather then just tell you how great video marketing is we are going to show you some stats that will open your eyes on just how important and vital online marketing video is to the success of your business.
Who Is Watching Online Videos?
Both Accenture and Search Engine Journal, 85% of internet users in the US view online videos on a regular basis. In March 2011 alone the US viewed 5.7 billion videos online, which included 4.3 billion online video advertisements (Comscore, March 2011 Online Video Rankings).
That is a massive amount of people watching a ton of videos, including advertisements. And while most of us tend to skip right past annoying ads on the TV with new technology devices such as our DVR sets, viewers tend to be much more receptive to online ads. One obvious reason is that online ads don’t last long, most are under a minute while TV ads can be 3+ minutes. At most, an online ad is a short 15-45 second blurb that is thrown in between different online videos.
Videos Can Help Conversion Rates
So we have billions of people watching videos and ads online every day. That is great but what makes it even better is that videos have been proven to increase conversion rates exponentially for a number of companies in a number of different niches worldwide.
In January 2009 the online retailer Shoeline decided to add videos to help showcase their products, and are they glad they did! Adding videos had them seeing a 44% increase in online sales conversions (Internet Retailer, January 2009). Zappos reported similar numbers where they were seeing anywhere from 6% to 30% in their sales for products that had a video accompaniment (ReelSEO, December 2009).
This conversion increase shouldn’t come as a surprise. Having a video on a website has proven to increase one’s time visiting on the website. Internet Retailer reported that videos not only boosted conversion rates for the online retail site Living Direct, it increased the time spent on the site by 9%.
Going Mobile & Online Marketing
So what does that mean? Marketing firms and businesses should not forget about the mobile users.
Smart phone users prefer? That’s right, Video. Why? Because it’s faster to gather information and it’s seen as a more trustworthy source than text on a page. But here’s why smartphone users are important to you:
- By 2014, there will be more internet users than laptop and desktop users (Microsoft Tag Mobile Marketing Report, 2011)
- 50% of all local searches are done on mobile devices (Microsoft Tag Mobile Marketing Report, 2011)
- 46% of shoppers who are using mobile devices in stores are using them to compare a competitor’s website (Forsee Results, 2010)
- A recent Demandware survey revealed that 83% of smartphone users all considered their phones to be more valuable than any other in-store technology for shopping, and only 16% of shoppers believed that the sales associate was the best source of information. 43% of consumers will place more trust in a sale in their mobile device than any other device OR sales associate (Point of Sale News, May 2011)
- 77% of mobile video viewers are watching more video than they did a year ago (eMarketer 2010)
The bottom line: everyone is going mobile and mobile users are savvy shoppers. Videos will help sell your products and services and build trust and confidence that a mobile user needs in order to purchase from you rather then your competitor. If you don’t have a video marketing campaign, then I hope you see it is time to change and start implementing one today.
Key Takeaways
When you stop and think about video marketing and what it does, none of the stats just mentioned should be a huge surprise. In the faceless and anonymous world of the internet, having a video allows something that once was intangible to be more tangible.
You can see what it is you are thinking about buying or using. You can see what it does, how it performs, what it looks like, how others have experienced it. Videos allow your potential clients to visualize themselves using your product or service and it helps them trust more o they feel more compelled to make a purchase. And with any luck, your video could go viral which will bring in even more traffic than you could ever imagine.
Need Help With Video Marketing?
If video marketing is something you are interested in but are having trouble getting started contact us today at 888.557.1258.
Get your FREE Local Reputation Report www.MyLocalReputationReport.com and find out what your customers are saying about you online.