According to the Nielsen Company’s recent Social Media Report, social networks and blogs reach nearly 80 percent of active internet users in the U.S. Social media has not only become a medium by which many people have shared their life stories, but more and more businesses are also using social media to share their brand’s message. Because social media is still a fairly new medium of marketing, businesses have yet to fully understand how to make a deeper, more personal connection with customers or potential customers via these platforms. It’s easy enough to post company news and blast special deals to people, but if you really want to build a powerful community of people who will happily promote your products or services, your social media strategy must include the following Three E’s: Engage If you’ve been reading up on social media, you’ve probably seen this buzz word floating around in marketing circles. The word has probably been so overused that it’s lost some … [Read more...]

There are more than 7000 websites, including Wikipedia, that went offline today as part of a protest against a bill up for congressional vote called SOPA. Several others darkened content as part of the protest (take a look at the front pages of Google and Wordpress.com). SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is a nice-sounding name (who doesn't hate copyright theft?), except that the bill goes well-beyond that. Mashable has a great article on it and here's a link to an infographic that explains more about what SOPA is. Here's a hypothetical situation: A bride buys her wedding invitations off of Etsy. What she doesn't know is that the Etsy seller knocked off the designs from another invitation designer. At the wedding, the photographer takes a photo of the invitation. The wedding gets published on a famous wedding blog. The bride is ecstatic and so are all of the wedding pros who worked with her. The bride shares photos on Facebook, on her own personal … [Read more...]

Try as you may, you simply cannot avoid the presence of social media in today’s society. Everywhere you look, you see the familiar icons of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media applications on a variety of different informational outlets, from Web sites and blogs to more traditional marketing pieces such as print advertisements and television commercials. What started as a venue for people to communicate amongst themselves and share information with family and friends has turned into an increasingly important marketing component of businesses of all sizes. A growing number of consumers, especially younger ones, will visit a business’ social media site as readily as they would its main Web site. This creates a perfect marketing opportunity for a small business owner or operator to target even more prospective customers, as well as maintain ongoing communication with his or her existing customer base. However, it’s typically not as easy as creating a simple … [Read more...]

No one could argue that our world isn’t changing fast—and I don’t mean just technology-wise. Consumers aren’t spending like they once did, manufacturing and shipping costs are fluctuating wildly, and the age of the environment is slowly (finally) being ushered in. On top of that, the Internet has finally really changed the way people shop and buy – not to mention the way we entrepreneurs market our businesses. If you don’t change your business, and your marketing, to keep up with changing times you can easily become another failure statistic. Think about it…five years ago MySpace was all the rage. Since then its usage has dropped dramatically, you hardly ever hear about it anymore. You never run into a business owner giving MySpace any time or thought now. So to help you thumb your nose at all the dire economic news and make 2012 your best ever, here’s my list of 7 things you can do to make it happen. 1) Make a list of what worked and didn’t work in … [Read more...]

Let’s face it, starting a business can be very easy, but stayingin business can be very difficult given that our customers have too many choices on where to spend their hard-earned cash.  So the question I posed to small business owners was “How do you make your business stand out from the crowd so that people will choose to spend their dollars with you?”  Here are 30 of the best responses that I received from businesses located all over the world!  I hope there’s a few that resonate with you.   1. Give ‘Em What They Want   For us, at The Burger Dive, it was all about offering something that we didn’t think our city really had, and that we believed would be wanted. Our city is overflowing with fast food burger chains, and a couple of higher end burger chains, but it really lacked that one little mom and pop burger joint that everyone loves. We have maintained our standards from day one, using only fresh and quality ingredients. We make everything … [Read more...]

With the amount of Christmas online spending continuing to grow each year and the competition in the search results being at its most intense, what can you do to make sure you increase your sales and take a bigger slice of that Christmas spend? In this blog post I’ll highlight some changes you can make to your website, their desired effect and some examples of how they work in practice. At this time of year it is more important than ever to make your customers feel reassured with their purchase. 1. Create a dedicated Christmas section on your website highlighting products suitable for Christmas gifts and add this section to the main navigation of your website to make it prominent. 2. Offer clear delivery information on how long deliveries will take and the state the final order dates in order for customers to receive their purchases in time for Christmas.  Also offer free delivery during the run up to Christmas. Free delivery can make the difference between a customer … [Read more...]

The great news is that the e-commerce sector continues to grow. In fact, findings from Forrester Research point to an anticipated compound growth rate in e-commerce of 10 percent from 2010 to 2015, when it is expected to reach $278.9 billion. As this market sector continues to grow, online marketers are constantly looking for ways to seize more of the large e-commerce pie while boosting ROI. One of the most effective ways to do this is through search marketing. Yet if everybody’s applying similar techniques, how can you stand out among the crowd? This can be especially challenging in the continuously evolving search marketing world. There are three simple yet often overlooked areas that search marketing professionals can address today to boost their online presence. These areas are account structure, device targeting and continuous testing. While these three categories may seem obvious, they actually tend to represent the most missed opportunities. Let’s take a more … [Read more...]

While almost every company uses social media, the top initiative for doing so may be different than one might think — recruitment. The “ROI of Social Media in the Enterprise” survey from SelectMinds — a developer of social recruiting and community management solutions — shows that while 86 percent of firms are using social media in their organizations, the top social media initiative is recruiting/talent acquisition, at 72 percent. According to the survey, 81 percent of the participating HR professionals claim to use social networks to help recruit candidates, with LinkedIn and Facebook being the most frequently used sites. And although most corporations are maintaining Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups and Twitter accounts — in-house social networks have also gained momentum, with 63 percent of respondents claiming that their companies are using social networks for current employees. For corporations using an in-house network, most (62%) are using it for job … [Read more...]

You’ve listened to the experts and other successful business owners. You’ve developed an interactive website with all of the functionality one could ask for. You’ve launched an engaging blog. You’ve established a social media presence by creating Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages. And you’ve provided customers with online tools that can make their lives easier, such as online appointment scheduling, payment processing or customer support. You sit back and wait for them to converge on your website, blog and social media properties in droves. You wait and wait and wait…but the traffic does not meet your expectations. How can this be? What happened? Isn’t everyone anxious to interact with you online, instead of contacting you over the phone or by e-mail? Depending on the type of services your business provides and the characteristics and habits of your customers, this “slam dunk” of an action plan may take a more concentrated and focused effort to implement … [Read more...]