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How to Combine Real-World and Social Media Marketing

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Believe it or not, real-world, in-person marketing, which may include booths, physical advertising (as in signs or banners), or demonstrations make it easy to tie in social media marketing efforts. By making your social media presence known to potential customers at your in-person event, it is possible to get a more involved online community that will carry on past any marketing events a company may hold.

Giveaways and Perks

During South by Southwest Interactive 2012, American Express had a booth that gave perks to attendees who connected their Twitter account with their American Express account. Those who did received perks, such as statement credits or t-shirts. The booth was constantly full of people waiting for their perk. Other booths at the popular annual conference held in Austin, TX included tweeting about a company or mentioning their custom South by Southwest Interactive hashtag. Attendees has no problem tweeting to receive a free t-shirt or other types of perks.

Signing up for Updates

Promoting your digital newsletter by having a sign-up sheet at your promotional event is a surprising way to get more mailing list subscribers relatively easily. Explaining the benefits of getting on the mailing list, such as coupons, exclusive events, or news updates can provide customers an incentive to write down their contact information.

Put the Information Out There

Sometimes companies may be surprised as how many customers just like their company page or follow them on Twitter just because the information is given to them. Put social media profile URLs on all marketing materials and correspondence, including flyers, brochures, business cards, banners, and even packaging. If a customer genuinely likes a product and wants to learn more about them, they are more likely to connect with them via social media. It may seem too good to be true, but just putting it out there can make a company more successful with their online social media marketing.

Stay Creative

Instead of badgering customers to sign-up for a newsletter, follow a company on Twitter, and like their page on Facebook over and over, think of a way to make it more creative. Give users reasons WHY they should complete an action. Skype at South by Southwest Interactive had another good example of this. When attendees tweeted about the conference and mentioned Skype with a special hashtag, a “Town Crier”, dressed up in American Colonial garb of a traditional town crier, read the tweets out loud in a Colonial accent of an iPad covered up by a leather book cover. The town crier generated a crowd and was a great way to get attention online and in person.

 

Thinking outside the box with clever, seamless offline and online promotions, along with a great overall design, can help a business stay connected with current and potential customers, no matter the event or time of year.

How to Promote Events via Facebook

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Facebook event marketing balloons

Facebook can be a great place to promote upcoming events, whether they are sales, concerts, meetings, conferences, or other meetings. They can receive a lot of exposure quickly, especially because events are easy to share on users’ Facebook profiles, and they can also RSVP and invite their friends.

Beyond creating an event on a business or organization’s Facebook page, there are other elements where an event can be promoting thoroughly up to and throughout  the event.

Creating Events on a Facebook Page

This is the first step towards Facebook event promotion is to create the event. To create a new event, go to http://www.facebook.com/YOURPAGENAMEHERE?sk=events&create once you are logged in as an admin.

Make sure to fill out all the information, include a main photo, and invite guests. Currently, Facebook only allows users to invite their own friends, not the other users who have ‘liked’ a page. Add employees as admins and allow them to invite their contacts and friends to make the guest list grow.

Once the event is created, add a link to it on the page newsfeed and start promoting it.

Upload Photos and Videos

Leading up to the event, post photos, videos, and other applicable content about the event (such as newspaper or blog mentions). This can help continue to drive buzz about the event. For example, a recent concert in Kansas City had several headliners. In the weeks leading up to the event, they posted recent music videos by artists that were performing at the concert. This helped keep the event fresh in users’ minds, since the music videos were appearing in their newsfeeds, and it also helped create a level of constant engagement and conversation until the concert.

Likewise, event organizers could post photos and videos of past annual events, testimonials from event-goers, updated ticket information, and other media that will continue to keep users’ interests up about the event.

Advertisements

Make sure the event is promoted organically as much as possible, but events can also be promoted via Facebook ppc advertising as well. Using the PPC (pay-per-click) campaign, you will only pay when users actually click on an ad. Because Facebook can help your ad accrue impressions at a rapid pace (especially if you are in a large metropolitan area), it can be a good option for events happening soon.

No matter how your event is promoted via Facebook, be sure to have complete information and be available to answer questions and monitor content if needed.

Online Advertising Strategies To Get Out of PPC Limbo

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PPC, short for pay-per-click is usually the go-to paid online advertising strategy for companies wishing to get a foothold on their online presence. However, depending on a business’ industry, PPC can get very competitive and extremely costly. Instead of relying on PPC, it may be worthwhile to try other innovative online advertising strategies that may help you continue to grow your online presence.

Affiliate Marketing

For online service providers that offer online services or products, an affiliate program may be a great way to get exposure and let others grow your business for you. Affiliate marketing is promising individuals a percentage of the total sales, or a set price, for every item sold through the marketer’s personalized link. A reference code or personalized link can ensure that a marketer would get the commission from the sale that they helped generate.

There are many online affiliate networks, like Chitika, that will help you get affiliate marketers for your product. Commission Junction, Linkshare, and ClickBank are also well-known affiliate advertising networks.

Another opportunity to grow traffic through affiliate marketing is running an affiliate marketing page on your business’ website. Assigning marketers a special coupon code buyers can input in the checkout process or using a plugin or service to generate personalized links are two options to run and manage an affiliate marketing program on your own website.

Blogger Outreach Programs

According to some, blogs are becoming the new newspaper, with some getting hundreds of thousands hits every day. Because of this, many bloggers have the power to expose your products to thousands of potential customers that may not know about it otherwise.

Companies can work with blogging outreach networks, such as CleverGirls, Influenster, and Fitfluential, or they can simply begin contacting blog owners directly through contact forms or their public email address. Offer to host a giveaway or send the blogger free products in exchange for an honest review. This can be a timely process, but forging a personal relationship with bloggers can help create an open flow of exposure for new products in the future.

Social Media Contests

Regularly offering contests and giveaways through social media can be a great way to help gain online exposure. Use a contest widget like Rafflecopter on a website, blog, or Facebook page to collect entries and require entrants to tweet about the giveaway or follow the company on Facebook and Twitter.

Do you have any other good online advertising strategies? If so, let us know in the comments.

 

Brand Equity and Mascots?

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WHen I built my blog in 2006 it was completely by accident that I stuck to some sort of branding in the form of an insect (the title of my blog is “A Bugged Life”). Four template changes later, I’ve managed to keep this brand and it’s been known by the local community. I’ve contemplated on going crazy with the idea by building a full mascot outfit of a huge cute bug which can be displaced during new media events. Mugs, tees, stickers — yeah you get the idea.

What sort of personal branding have you done as a blogger to enhance your equity in other spheres apart from the online space? Have you gone crazy with the idea or are you happy with the way your blog is now? Is your blog ubiquitous, allowing it to take on many shapes even off the Internet?

I write this in reference to the resurrection of UK’s Ask Jeeves — based on surveys, despite Jeeves’ departure from the Internet in 2006, he still brings forth a lot of brand recall as “Jeeves” is easier and more fondly remembered than a corporate logo. And in Asia, just look at the brand recognition Ajinomoto has achieved with it’s “Dapur Umami” online cooking class.

2010 Reminder: Test the Monetization of Your Blog

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Monetization can get lost in all the blogging activities we have to juggle. Let’s face it, there’s a lot that goes into blogging. Content, marketing, and building relationships take up a lot of our time and it can be easy to forget about monetization. But if you want to make money with your blog, you can’t ignore, well, the making money part 🙂

I believe that content and traffic comes first, but after you generate a healthy content and traffic base, there comes a time when you must focus on optimizing your monetization. Otherwise, you’ll leave a lot of money on the table.

So, at the beginning of a new year, I thought I’d remind you to look at your monetization tactics and see how you can improve on them. How can you get conversion rates and make more money with the same amount of traffic? I’ll share two examples from my sites.

There are various ways to approach the monetization process but basically it boils down to testing. In other words, try different ways to make money. Then, let them run at the same time and after a couple weeks, analyze the results and pick the best method.

Testing AdSense

I’ve been testing the AdSense ads for a dating blog I co-own with my sister. The blog reached a respectable level of traffic a few months ago, so I started optimizing the ads since they were the blog’s primary income source.

In my first test, I created two different ads and placed them above the fold and below the fold. Then, I let them run for a couple of weeks. During the testing period, ad #1 ran half the time and ad #2 ran in the other half. After the test, it was pretty clear what we needed to do to make more money. Above the fold, ad #1 made almost four times as much money as ad #2. Below the fold, both ads made the same amount of money but it was very small amount.

Based on the results, we kept ad #1 above the fold and discarded ad #2. The money from the ads below the fold was so low that we scrapped them to make the site less cluttered.

Giving Up on a Strategy

Sometimes you have to drop a monetization strategy since it’s clearly not working. For example, I’ve tried multiple ways to get AdSense working on my gaming blog. The biggest program was the irrelevancy. AdSense kept showing irrelevant ads even when I tried to tweak my posts. Because of this, the dating blog makes 30 times more than the gaming blog yet it has half the amount of traffic. I understand that dating is probably a more lucrative niche than gaming but not 30 times more!

Therefore, I scrapped AdSense and found a couple related affiliate programs. It’s still early, but the numbers have been better than AdSense.

Continual Improvement Through Testing

Fortunately, it doesn’t take much time to set up a monetization campaign. Most of the work is just setting up a test and that can be done in a couple of hours. Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to check it until a couple days or weeks have passed. Then, you spend a couple more hours to analyze the results, make the necessary changes, and setup a new test.

But you do have to remind yourself to continually test every couple weeks or so. Again, it’s easy to forget since you can get lost in all content generation and marketing so put it on the calendar as a reminder.

Performancing offers blog management services.

Thanks to our sponsor, Winners Circle

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We’d like to thank our Performancing sponsor, Winners Circle.

With numerous educational websites offering mentoring programs and promising to help business oriented people make money on the internet today, it can be quite a challenge choosing which one is right for your needs. First time entrepreneurs in the internet business can be overwhelmed with the wealth of information available to them. The vast resources are helpful all right but not all can ensure success in terms of driving traffic and profits.
[Read more…] about Thanks to our sponsor, Winners Circle

Getting Links to your Blog

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Is your blog not experiencing the volume of traffic that you would like to see? One of the major flaws that many blog owners do not consider is the importance of links and linking. Links are to a blog, what highways are to the automotive world. Without highways, information, people, and goods cannot reach their destination. The same is true when talking about links. You can post the most credible or well written blog on the internet, but without proper linking from your post, or to it, the information you have provided is simply that: yours.

Links take readers of other blogs and different miscellaneous websites to areas of the internet that they normally would never have gone. Your blog might just be one of the areas that are outside of their comfort zone. These internet users are crucial to your blog’s survival. One of the most important reasons why it is essential to build a large linking network to your blog is how much higher you rank in search engines.

One of the methods that search engines like Google and Yahoo! use to rank their pages is how many other websites link to it. For example, a site that has fifty sites linking to it is more likely to be higher on a search engine list than a website that has ten. Keep in mind that this is not always the case, but this is definitely a good rule of thumb.

Another element that is crucial to the growth of your blog is the quality of the links that you provide. While gaining reputation through other websites, you have to ask yourself if the websites that are linking to you are doing you any good. If your blog is on the best Super Nintendo games of all time and you are getting links from sites that focus on the poverty of developing nations, then search engines are not going to take your blog seriously. If, however, you can find a way to talk to Nintendo itself and convince them to link to your blog, then your credibility and influence is going to be greatly affected in a positive way. It takes a combination of quality and quantity for your blog to gain strength on multiple search engines.

Again, it is the goal of a successful website or blog to be first on a search engine’s results, or at least on the first page. While this process may take a while, if you produce quality content, then you can be sure that you will succeed.

The most important part about linking is actually convincing someone to link to you. There are two methods that almost all blog owners use, due to their ease and effectiveness. One method is to actually write on someone else’s blog; a quick article is usually sufficient. This is a quick and easy way to simply show the bloggers on that site that you exist, and as long as you produce great content, then many of them will stop at your blog regularly. The more direct route that many blog owners use is to just simply ask another website’s owner if he/she would be willing to link to you. Sometimes this method works beautifully.

Sometimes the person you asked may want to barter with you, such as an exchange of links. Just remember, the worst thing that can happen to you if you ask someone is that they will just say no. Simply thank them for their time and move on.

Eventually, your blog will begin to contain multiple links to and from many websites. Keep in mind that linking is equally affected by the quality and quantity of your linking potential.

The New Landing Pages

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With social media talk fluttering about, your product’s website doesn’t necessarily need to be discovered via search engine results or billboard ads (for more info, go to www.yourwebsiteyay.com). The past 3 years has brought forth a new set of “landing pages” for your brand. Here are some of them:

a. Social Networks: Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Yahoo! 360 (eep, they’ve closed!)… the list goes on. But which one should you join? Which platform should you grow your community? Should you pick at random? Should you do all? The key is to experiment, yes but according to Gladwell’s principles in Blink!, you may already know the answer — go for gut feel. If you still need social proof, take a look at your referral traffic in your stats page. In my case, I run a blog for a local men’s lifestyle magazine and we figured that Facebook and Plurk (not Twitter), give us the biggest referral traffic next to Multiply.com. It’s gut feel, solidified with stats.

b. Apps: Brands are slowly realizing this, by taking their brand name into sponsoring or co-developing applications mostly for your mobile phone. The iTunes store, open social app development for social networks, the Nokia Ovi store, the Android store — a plethora of opportunities lies in ubiquity. So let’s think for a bit: do we put that flash game in our website or do we bring the game to our users onto their Facebook profiles and iPhone apps? I say the latter!

c. Brand Ambassadors: There’s nothing like good ‘ol word of mouth. Genuine word of mouth. Not those conceived “viral” messages that get passed on artificially. I personally think PR practitioners should be more attentive to what goes on in the circle of their “stakeholders” on the web. There are tools for this — Twitter hashtags are great ways for finding people who have good things to say about your product. Why not encourage them to love you more by giving them a little push (like a review unit of your upcoming phone). It isn’t about losing credibility. It’s about selection and being a smart marketer.