Video Distribution and Analytics – Send It Out and Watch It Perform
You have staged a stunt, written a script or put together a power point presentation. Next, you have made a video using your ideas and plans. Now you can upload it to YouTube or your website. However, if you want to send out your video faster and to more people, you can use a video distribution service, which might also give you analytics to help you watch its performance.
There are paid video distribution services that sometimes your video to send to up to two hundred video sharing websites, social networking websites, blogs, and other websites. If you want to pay for a service like that, you should be sure that you are going to have an extensive and powerful campaign.
If your budget is less or you want to spend less of it on video distribution, you can go with a free service. Free services still send out your video to several sites for you. All you have to do is get your video ready and click a few buttons to upload it and enter the meta data.
When your video is deployed to all the distribution points, you will quickly see it climb the search engine results pages. Your video will show up multiple times in a search result because it is coming from several places on the web.
Beyond the search engine advantages, there is also the fact that people who go on each of the sites your video is being distributed to will have a chance to see your video. You will get a kind of mass exposure that you could not possibly get from just one website.
Many video distribution services also have analytics. It is easy to see how many people have viewed your video. Data will show which search terms people are using to bring up your video. You can learn which of the sites is showing the most viewers for your video, and how long they are staying to listen to your complete video. Many services go so far as to provide sales campaign statistics for you related to your video, such as social actions and completion rates.
Since you can get the service for free, there is no reason not to ignore the opportunity. It takes no more effort to set up a video with a distribution service than with one video sharing site alone, once you have gotten started. Video distribution and analytics improve your video marketing campaign and take it to a higher level.
Target Marketing Challenge – Aiming At Multiple Marks
You might be better off thinking outside the box when it comes to finding your target market. Conventional wisdom says that you should find the group of people who will use your product and market directly to them. That is true – to a point. Actually, you might have more than one target audience for your products. Consider how different people might use your product, and how you might cater to their needs.
For example, you might make plastic shower chairs. Your intended audience might be the elderly because of the fact that elderly people have trouble bathing themselves. The shower chair becomes a tool they use for grooming for the rest of their lives. You could market the chair based on the tastes and needs of the elderly demographic.
However, other people use plastic shower chairs as well. People who have had an injury sometimes use plastic shower chairs during their recovery period. These can be people of any age. You could discern patterns of users, such as accident victims, sports injury victims, or victims of violence. Aim at any or all of these demographics and you will find new markets for your product.
Your product might be much more commercial than a plastic shower chair, but it might have a variety of users nonetheless. The first step in marketing at multiple target audiences is finding them. Go on the social networking sites and notice what categories of people are responding when you happen on a discussion of your industry or types of products. When someone brings up the fact that they use your type of product for a different use than you expected, you might want to Direct Message them and have a private conversation about it.
The way to actually do the targeted marketing campaign is to have a multi-pronged approach in place. If you are doing article marketing, write some of the articles for the people who use your plastic chairs for sports injuries, including using keywords which they might type into search engines. Do the same for each different type of customer you are targeting. You should not spread yourself too thin, of course, but there is a way to do highly specific targeting to a variety of targets for better success.
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SMS Marketing – Text for Success
SMS marketing is not some mysterious formula for meeting all your business needs, but it can help you increase your profits. SMS is just Short Message Service; in other words, SMS refers to texts sent and received on mobile devices. There are several ways to use SMS marketing to gain website traffic, leads and sales.
1. Contests
Have a “fastest-finger” contest. The first person to text a given word to the SMS code given will win a prize. The prize might be a product you sell or something totally unrelated. The great thing about getting people involved in a contest is that they concentrate on the given word very hard to get it into the text as fast as possible. If the word to be texted is one of your brand name products or your current marketing slogan, that will stick in their minds. The depth of attention will be more than it would be with many other marketing methods.
2. Coupons
There are a number of ways to get mobile text coupons to your potential customers. All you need is a short, one-line ad to say, “Text [my word] to [my number] to receive a coupon good for [my product].” It could be in a flyer, a radio or TV ad or even on your business card. People can use SMS texts to get the coupon, and then all they have to do is show their phones to the clerk in the store to get their discount.
3. Voting
Voting by SMS can get your potential customers busy texting you very quickly. You can have people vote on what types of products they like best. Give them 4 choices; make sure you make selections from among the types of products you sell. Many people find polls to be fun and entertaining. You could mention that you will post the results of your poll on your Facebook Fan page to get them interested even more, thus increasing your social network at the same time.
4. Opt-In
You can use SMS to get people to opt-in to SMS or email marketing notifications. All they have to do is to send you a text with the right word to your SMS number. Then, to guide people to your specific products through SMS, you can text them with short news texts on the best deals you offer for that type of product. They will appreciate the insider information. SMS marketing can not only gain you leads, but it can also gain you customers and loyal ones at that.
Woman Reading Sms by Petr Kratochvil
Customer Support Input – An Untapped Resource for Internet Marketing
Most small to medium sized businesses use their admin and sales staff to come up with ideas for their in-house Internet marketing campaigns. They reason that these are the idea people, so they are best suited to coming up with great new proposals to consider. Yet, a little utilized resource for insightful details is your customer support staff.
Customer support staff is attuned to the pulse of your business. They know what customers are most concerned about with your products. Sometimes a customer will say they like one thing about your products or company even as they are complaining about the problem they called about. It may be that your customer service people hear many compliments about specific aspects of your business. That is a valuable resource because you know what strengths you already have that you can promote.
Another way customer support staff can help is by letting you know the buzzwords that people are using to explain their problems. You will want to fix the problems with your company and products, obviously. Once you do that, it is time to get the word out to your customer. Using the same types of phrasing they used to describe their difficulties can make an impact. This is especially true if you use the most commonly used descriptive phrases as keyword phrases in articles with links pointing back to your website.
Customer service can be a thankless job at times. You get busy and forget to praise your customer support staff or reward their accomplishments. You focus on the problems they present to you that need to be fixed rather than the fact that they are helping you improve your products and service.
When you utilize your customer support staff for brainstorming sessions on your Internet marketing campaign, they understand that their opinions are valuable to the company. Make it worth their time by adding a bonus for their participation. Not only will they help you with your current campaign, but they will also become more alert to customer trends in the future. Customer service personnel offer a perspective you can get nowhere else.
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Ebook Offers – How Information Giveaways Can Help with Your Internet Marketing Efforts
Offer potential customers a free ebook that contains information that is valuable to them, and they will come running to your site. Everyone wants something for nothing, and if people feel that the something is worth their time, they want it enough to give something in return. The goal is to eventually make sales, of course. The key to success is in knowing what to give, how to give it and what to expect from those who consider taking you up on your ebook offer.
What to Give
You have some kind of specialized knowledge if you own or manage a business. You are in a trade, a profession or an industry with specific products and services to offer. These products and services are valuable to your potential customers, or you would not be able to sell them. Therefore, it stands to reason that you can present information related to the products that will also be important to them.
Writing an ebook is simpler than you might think. If you look at it like writing a full length book, you are bound to be intimidated. Do not get caught in that trap. An ebook need not be over 50,000 words, and it can be as short as 2500 words. If it is long enough to create a valuable experience for the reader, it is long enough.
Yet, like in writing any other book, you should go by the old adage, “Write what you know.” You are an expert in your field. If you are a toy seller, write about the how to choose toys for a child. If you are a dog-walker, write about how to handle dogs when you take them for a walk. You might have to do some research about some themes, but you should have a basic understanding of the topic in order to make yourself believable as an authority on the subject.
Make sure you supply a link back to your website in the ebook whenever appropriate. If you do that, people will not forget you or how to find you again.
How to Give It
There are several ways to get the attention of your target market with your ebook offer. One way is to write articles for article directories and place the ebook offer in the resource box of the articles. The offer only needs to include the title of your ebook and a link users can follow to go to the download page.
Another way is to have the link for the download page on your blog. It is a good idea to mention the ebook in your blog if it is natural to do so. Pique people’s interest so that they will read to the end of the blog and follow your link to the ebook. You can even put the link to your ebook download page right on your website. If you have done plenty of SEO on your website, you will get visitors to your site who will see the offer. Make sure to put the ebook offer right on the front page.
What to Expect
The first thing you can expect is that people who are interested will follow the link to your download page to check out the offer. The one thing you will definitely want to get from people who want to take you up on your ebook offer is some of their contact information. Ask that they opt-in to your newsletter or marketing emails. This will build your database of potential customers.
The third thing to expect is that, if you have done a good job of writing your ebook, your potential customers will become more interested in your industry or products. Finally, you can certainly expect that some of these ebook readers will convert into paying customers when they return to your website to find out more about your products.
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Landing Page Perfection – Why It Matters Where You Send Your Content Viewers
Once you have put out all your advertising, SEO articles, press releases, blog posts and updates to social networks, you will probably expect traffic to start pouring into your website. You will also hope to have increased sales and grow a larger customer base. Yet, there might be one thing standing in your way. If your landing page is less than ideal, you might not get very many visitors who actually explore your site.
In most Internet marketing campaigns, you spend time and money producing informative and compelling content for outside websites to lead back to yours. The people who read, listen to or view your content are in it for the experience. If your website landing page does not offer them the experience they want, they will navigate away immediately.
If you are wondering what makes a good landing page, you are in good company. Savvy business owners and managers all over the web are experimenting with different landing pages to try for the largest possible return on investment for all those hours and dollars spent marketing. Trial and error can often help you find what works best, because the same landing pages do not work the same for every crowd.
Consider your target audience. If they are the pampered sort, they might want a lot of pomp and circumstance. If that is the case, set up an impressive display on your website landing page. That could be a spread with stunning visual images and well-polished writing on the page, for example. Go for the most luxurious design you can make to entice your affluent or cultured audience to find out more about your company.
On the other hand, if your target audience is a young, technologically advanced crowd, you might get farther with a layout that incorporates video along with current techno lingo. Add a high-tech interactive experience right on the landing page, and you will attract your target audience even more – perhaps to the point that they will share your website features with others.
Gaining cachet with your target audience is perhaps the most important reason for having a terrific landing page. Your content attracts a specific audience, but it cannot keep them on your website. However, when people get a first impression of you that strikes a chord with them, they will feel enough of a connection to find out more. When audiences see by your landing page that you can speak their language, they will stick with you. Reading on to find out more of what is on your site just comes naturally after that.
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Market towards the Future and Not Just the Past
In most of your website analytics, you are looking at the past to see what has already worked for you in the Internet marketing game. While this is a valuable use of your time, it does not tell the whole story. Some aspects of the market are bound to change during your upcoming marketing campaign, and you need to be ready for them. Here are a few ways you can plan for the future.
1. Trending Topics Trending topics and trending videos on social websites can give you an idea of the next big thing. You may have to wade through a lot of chatter and silly ideas that are destined to be no more than fads. However, there are trending topics that will tell you about the newest ideas on the minds of people everywhere. Some of these are problems for which no solution has yet been created. Just think: you can be the first to solve the problem with a hot-selling new or repurposed product.
2. Developing Patterns Patterns are all about the past, right? Well, actually, no. The individual bits of information making up the pattern are a part of the past, but the overall curve usually marches on into the future barring any new developments. It is graphs over time where you will see where your marketing efforts are heading.
Look up a keyword in Google Insights that you might use for your business, and see how it has fared over the course of the past few years. If there is a recurring pattern, use the keyword in your SEO articles and on your website in the next such period of time. For instance, if you sell textbooks, you might see a spike in the keyword phrase “used textbook” just before the start or right after the end of a college semester. Use that information to employ that keyword heavily at exactly that time.
3. News Stories Keep up with the news, both general news and industry news. You will want to be the first to know when something is happening that will affect your business. Do not wait for the information to filter down to you through casual channels. Go out seeking enlightenment on the subjects that are pertinent to your business. You will stay ahead of many of your competitors, and you will know what your target audience wants the most.
4. Talk to Everyone Talk on Facebook, Twitter or whatever social networking sites where you have accounts. Bring up hopes, plans and needs for the future. Share your expertise, but most of all, listen to what your target audience is saying. They probably know what they want better than you could ever dream to. All you have to do is give them the time and the respect of listening to their ideas.
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Start Keyword Research Only After First Clarifying Your Marketing Objectives
It is important to do keyword research before you attempt search engine optimization of your website, blog, articles or other content. Without knowing what people are looking for, you will not know what keywords to supply. However, there is one step to Internet marketing you need to do even before you take on keyword research. That is clarifying the purpose of your marketing campaign.
You need to determine what you want your customers or potential customers to do when they get your marketing message before you will know how to construct it. Some of the possibilities are visiting your website, signing up for a newsletter, purchasing one or several of your products, sharing your company information with others, opting-in for marketing materials and subscribing to your blog by RSS feed.
Your keyword research will revolve around the choices you make in establishing the motives for your marketing campaign. For example, if you want to do campaigns for the purpose of getting people to interact with you over a long period, you would lean towards keywords that have staying power over a long period of time. If you just want to run a blast campaign to get people to buy a product to boost sales over the short run, the focus would be on the latest keyword trends instead.
Your objectives might be best suited for a particular age range in terms of keyword research as well. If you want to get people to sign up for a newsletter, you might be more likely targeting people in an older group than those who would sign up for an RSS feed, for example. When you do keyword research, you can break it down to age and other demographic groups in some cases, to get an idea of what different people type into the search engines as opposed to people in other groups.
Use everything you know about your intentions relating to your marketing campaign when you go to the keyword research sites and software. You will come up with the most winning words and phrases to reach your objectives if you take some time to think ahead before you get to those helpful tools.
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Grouping Your Customers for Better Internet Marketing Campaigns
You already know that one of the best ways to succeed in an Internet marketing campaign is to have a highly targeted audience. You want to reach the people who are going to buy without hesitation because you strike a chord with them. One of the best ways to find these people is to group your present and potential customers into natural sets of consumers.
Some easy groupings can be done when you keep lists of the customers who buy different types of products. For example, you might sell two products – weight loss and bodybuilding supplements. Sort your customers by which of your two products they prefer to buy. Then, when you get a new product in either line, you will know which group to target with that marketing campaign.
If you are an Internet based business, or you ship products to faraway places, you might group people by location. You might sell the same things in different places, but your approach may not be the same from one place to another. A Midwest location might respond well to a marketing campaign highlighting traditional values, while a West Coast location might feel better about a campaign featuring earth-friendly values.
Another way to group your customers is by the way they interact with you. Are they a Facebook group, a Twitter following or do they actually come into your place of business? The ways you talk to them will determine how you approach them to get your sales message across. It will determine whether you are going to launch an information-based campaign or a more directly sales-oriented communication, as well as where you meet up with them in real or cyber space.
You can group potential customers by how they find you. Analytics software can show you how they get to your website, whether they came from another website or what search term they used if they came by search. Once you learn how they reached you, you can get an idea of their interests.
For the theoretical weight loss and bodybuilding supplement company listed above, they might notice that most of their traffic is coming from weightlifting sites. They could use that information one of two ways. Either they could focus on that group of customers and target them more heavily with the bodybuilding products, or they could put forth a renewed effort to get more action on the weight loss side of the business.
No matter how you group your customers or potential customers, there are many ways to use the lists and information. One thing is certain. The more you know about the people who might buy your products, the more products you stand to sell.
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What You Can Accomplish with Mobile Marketing Opt-In Lists
There are several ways to accumulate a mobile marketing opt-in list. You can collect permissions and mobile numbers on your website. You can announce on your Facebook page that anyone sending a text to your SMS number will be included in company offers and information. You can even ask for permissions and numbers through a print media campaign. The bigger question is what do you do when you get the lists? Here are a few ideas.
1. Offer coupons and discounts.
You can send a barcode on a mobile device now, so that customers can simply hand their mobile over to the cashier at a local store and have it scanned as a coupon. This not only makes them happy by saving them money, but it also satisfies their desire to use new technology. The novelty of digital coupons will not last forever, but the savings will go on and on.
For discounts or coupons, all you really need to do is send a text that says, “Show this text for [X] % off [X Service or Product].” Customers who are interested will have no problem redeeming their discount, because most people carry their mobile devices with them at all times. You have just made the process much more convenient for them than if they had to clip a coupon and bring it into the store.
2. Announce events.
If you have a grand opening or a special sale, it is a nice idea to send a message with the specific details to your mobile marketing opt-in list. An even better idea is to have a VIP sale, and invite your opt-in list customers to a special sale held only for them. If you have a big enough opt-in list, this can be well worth your time and investment.
3. Introduce products.
Use your mobile marketing opt-in list to send a short announcement when you introduce a new product. This is only effective if it does not happen frequently. If you are sending out too many new product notifications, people will soon opt-out on you unless they are very loyal customers in the first place. Yet, if you use good judgment, you can send out the occasional message on a new product and your customers will thank you for the information.
4. Get feedback.
Your mobile customers will be interested in giving you feedback if you do not push the matter too far. If you make a pest of yourself, your customers will be turned off. However, if you once in awhile ask them to vote on their favorite among your products or give a simple response as to whether they liked your service or not, you may get some information that will be useful to your company. More important than that, you will let your customers know that their input is important to you as well, and you will have the chance to develop some in depth consumer-seller relationships.
Photo: Mobile Phone by Anna Cervova