Archive for the ‘Internet Marketing’ Category

18
Oct 2011

Four steps to building a better brand on Facebook

Posted by Steve  >  Branding, Internet Marketing, Social Media
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Social platforms offer opportunities to market your business in exciting ways… which is great if you’re familiar with the inner workings, but for the beginner, the steps to building an business online can be daunting.  Understanding how to use platforms like Facebook and tap into the myriad marketing tools available is essential, and a great asset to every business’ online strategy.

Facebook has developed many tools for building and promoting brands, including Groups and Pages. While Groups are a great way to stay informed or connected about a specific topic or interest, Pages offer unique opportunities to connect with and engage new fans that groups and personal pages don’t.

Like all marketing strategies, you should have a long-term plan in place before you launch.  Here are four simple steps to getting started building your business on Facebook.

Step one: Organize your content before you create the page.

We call this process “seeding”, basically, populating your page with information.  Have all of your imagery, logos and business information ready in advance of creating your page as well as content for your first few posts. That way, when you launch your page and invite people to connect with you, they’ll have lots of great content to interact with.

Step two: Customize your Facebook URL

All page owners are allowed to set a custom URL for their Facebook pages. This is a must-do for any brand serious about marketing on Facebook, (would you rather have www.facebook.com/steveropergroup or www.facebook/pages/someonesname/verylong/willbeforgotten/376k7d9968396847 ? ) but it’s also a step to be taken with much care. Once you create a custom URL, you can’t edit or change it for any reason – so be sure it’s the one you want and make sure you have a back-up plan in case something goes wrong during the creation process, or if the name you want isn’t available.

Step three: Connect your other websites and social platforms

You’ll want to be sure that all of your online presences and business profiles, like Twitter, LinkedIn and your website or blog, are connected to your Facebook page. Thankfully, there are a lot of great tools and online applications that simplify the process, allowing you to focus on creating content and helping you get maximum exposure by syndicating and sharing the things you create automatically.

Step four:  Creating custom content

Creating custom content, like a custom contest or promotion, is a great way to engage your existing fans and attract new ones. Custom content can range from simple, single-page websites to complex multi-page promotions. Coca Cola (http://www.facebook.com/cocacola) has done some great things with Facebook, so have Starbucks (http://www.facebook.com/Starbucks) and VW (http://www.facebook.com/VW).

For most business, it’s easy and affordable to start with a simple concept, like a matching profile image and landing page and work your way up to full page websites, dynamic pages and more!

These steps are a great starting point, and they’re just that. Opportunities to engage are endless and limited only by your imagination.

Need help? That’s what we’re here for.

Contact The Steve Roper Group to initiate a social media campaign on Facebook today.

6
Sep 2011

Metrics to measure…

Posted by Steve  >  Analytics, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization
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As more and more companies move from “old marketing” or “outbound marketing” (tradeshows, print advertising, direct mail, telemarketing) and embrace “modern marketing” or “inbound marketing” (using the Internet to make it easier for customers to find you using your website, SEO, Social Media, Blogs, etc.) a lot of people wonder what metrics they should track to measure their success and progress.

Here are some ideas for the 5 marketing metrics you should track… in my opinion.

1) Website Grade - The great thing about this score is that is it very easy to understand (who doesn’t comprehend a 1 to 100 score?), and it compares you against your peers (currently over 70,000 other websites), and it is based on a number of different metrics so it summarizes data to save time.  Without fail, this metric really allows me to show clients positive development.

2) Website Traffic – This is the total number of unique visitors to your website over a time period, usually a month or a year.  This gives you a sense of the overall interest in your business, and if the marketing programs you are doing are working or not. This is a great metric to watch as you can create tactics quite easily to cause spikes in traffic… such as e-newsletters. We’ve done work with Partymart and sent a series of newsletters leading up to their most popular season, Hallowe’en, which increased their visitation and sales dramatically.

3) Leads - This is the next step in the sales funnel, and is the most important metric for measuring your marketing efforts. Integrating a newsletter sign-up form allows you to keep track of the conversion sign-ups and generates ‘qualified’ leads.

4) New Customers - “How many sales did you close this month?” is probably the most important question you should answer for your business.

5) Customer Acquisition Cost – Many businesses don’t compute this on an ongoing basis, but knowing the total sales and marketing cost for each new customer is important.  It gives you a good sense of how your business is going, and if it is getting easier or harder to grow.

So, that’s a few ideas on metrics I like to look at monthly.

 

29
Aug 2011

What is inbound marketing?

Posted by Steve  >  Internet Marketing
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If you’ve been in the marketing world in the past couple years, you’ve probably come across the term Inbound Marketing.  It seems to be gaining more and more steam, and people are more interested in what Inbound Marketing is and how it can help them.

Inbound Marketing is the practice of bringing qualified leads into your sales funnel rather than reaching outward to cold, questionable targets.

Traditional “outbound marketing” was largely focused on outbound methods such as cold calls, print ads, attending tradeshows, etc. The idea behind these techniques was to get in front of cold leads and warm them up to the point where they would try your product or service.

This form of marketing was largely a numbers game – you knew you had to, on average, get in contact with a certain large number of people before one of them would be interested and make a purchase. This method is inefficient and expensive, causing marketers to waste time getting in contact with tons of people who may have had no interest in their offering.

Inbound Marketing is becoming more popular as marketers look for efficient and affordable ways to acquire new leads. Some of the most popular Inbound Marketing techniques are blogging, interacting on social media, search engine optimization, and webinars.

All of these inbound methods pre-qualify the leads that discover your company, so you can be sure that your message is greeting welcoming ears rather than random outbound contacts. By bringing these warm leads into you, you will greatly save time and money on the old outbound strategies.

How Can I Use Inbound Marketing?

The most important part of a successful inbound marketing strategy is creating content that will bring people into your sales process. Another important element is ensuring that you have a site that is optimized to close leads into deals and engages visitors once they “land” on your website.

One of the most popular methods to accomplish this goal is by keeping an updated blog. A blog can provide many benefits for your organization, and almost all of them relate to Inbound Marketing. By creating great content, you’ll rise in organic search results, create linkable content, and educate your audience. All of these outcomes will help you bring in leads that have been pre-qualified through a Google search for relevant terms or by reading similar content that links to you.

We’ve also found that with most of the websites we develop, having a good Social Media presence helps greatly.  A simple Facebook Business Group allows you to post Like Buttons on every relevant page and allows people who are customers to easily Like a product you offer on their Facebook Page, exponentially adding to your search engine results.

1
Dec 2010

Increasing Visitation…

Posted by Steve  >  Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design & Strategy
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For the past five years, we have been actively working on increasing the visibility and success of Partymart.com.

This company has always held a special interest to me since I developed their identity for them in 2004. For a year or so, we went separate ways and in 2006, we reunited and it has been a successful partnership ever since.

Here are a few metrics of just how successful.

In 2007, Partymart received 120,086 visitors annually.

In 2008, with a variety of tactics, that visitation number increased to 387,001 Visitors

In 2009, with much more aggressive tactics and strategy, that increased to 810,771 Visitors

In 2010, by aggressively producing micro-sites and newsletters designed to drive traffic to the site, we will have increased that number to over 1,000,000 Visitors while decreasing our ad spending.

17
Apr 2010

Email marketing…

Posted by Steve  >  Internet Marketing
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There is research which suggests that email subscribers are worth up to 1.5 times more than non-subscribers and that email marketing is a cost-effective method of communicating with prospects and customers.

This is something we’ve proven to ourselves before making the claim.

We’ve been sending email newsletters for several years now on a regular basis and we know for a fact that in certain cases, we are receiving a 40% and more open rate.

This is a terrific open rate and after a year or two of sending regular emails, we start to learn which headlines generate the most interest and which generate the most sales by integrating analytics into the entire web site and following the proper metrics. It’s pretty interesting stuff…

We can help you;

• Grow your qualified email subscriber base using a double opt-in methodology, which guarantees your addresses get the email delivered to them and not filtered out into the spam box.

• Create relevant, targeted email messages that motivate customers to take action, from visiting a specific page within a store, to making an online purchase or downloading a pdf.

• Define success metrics and systems to track, report and analyze those metrics to measure and optimize your ROI

With these services, you will receive regular, insightful and actionable reports on how your overall internet marketing program is performing and how to continually improve –  and with our thirty years of marketing and creative background, the integration becomes a web presence which outperforms your competitors and maintains brand identity.

9
Aug 2009

What is Internet Marketing ?

Posted by Steve  >  Internet Marketing
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The more people I talk to, the more often I hear the question, ‘What is internet marketing ?’

Internet marketing is the act of applying strategies and techniques on the Internet to support an organization’s overall marketing objectives. The primary goal is to bring more marketing exposure to a website.

Web Internet marketing may include the following:

- keyword and meta tag strategies
- search engine optimization
- web optimization
- paid advertising
- blogs
- newsgroup and mailing list postings
- banner advertising
- reciprocal links
- online promotions
- content positioning
- online image development
- email strategies

We can help with all of these strategies. Contact us…

19
Jul 2009

The Value of Blogs for your web site…

Posted by Steve  >  Internet Marketing
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I’ve been building several Blogs this year and often get asked, ‘Why should I have a Blog?’.

Well, the fact is, fresh content attracts more attention from search engines. Search engines love fresh content and there is no EASIER way to create relevant regular content than a blog.

Search engines crawl websites with fresh content more regularly. Although search engines will come past your site frequently, daily or even weekly visits are limited to sites that are more popular and more importantly, those with regularly changing content.

If you’ve been wondering if your company should have a Blog, contact me and I’ll help you set one up in a way that suits your company.

If the meantime, check out the Partymart Blog here >

16
Feb 2009

What are Backlinks and why are they important?

Posted by Steve  >  Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization
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Backlinks are links that are directed towards your websites, also knows as Inbound links. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.

A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality.

6
Jan 2009

Traditional Toys Newsletter

Posted by Steve  >  Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design & Strategy
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Welcome to the first TJ Whitneys Newsletter. TJ Whitneys is a multi award-winning company specializing in reproduction golden era toys. Our mission is to produce classic wooden toys and games with remarkable play value ad this is their first newsletter in preparation for the launch of their new web site coming in January 2009.

See the original web site here >

2
Jan 2009

How successful are our web sites… find out.

Posted by Steve  >  Analytics, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design & Strategy
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So, this month we started drilling down into how successful a number of our web sites have been for our clients this year.

Here’s a few of the results;

- In March 2008, we launched a new web site for CVS Cruise Victoria and are pleased to say it has quadrupled in ranking since.

- In May 2008, we really drilled down into Ocean’s Edge to optimize the site and have watched it double in popularity since then.

- Since June, we have been consulting with Partymart and are pleased to see their web site has risen in popularity from sitting in the Top 71% of all global web sites to being in the Top 91% of ALL global web sites… a 20% increase.

- In July, 2008, we optimized the web site of Emmy Award winning underwater photographer and cinematogrpaher, Jonathan Bird, which has increased the popularity by 25% and achieved first page search results rankings for several of the keywords for the first time ever and has remained there.

- In September 2008, we launched a new web site for CondoSky and watched as their grading DOUBLED in one week. In two months, the site has gone from having an overall grading of 39/100 globally to 66/100 globally and increased their lead generation by 67% !

That’s pretty positive results.

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