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Consider Independent Music For Music Promotions

December 2nd, 2010 No comments

Music promotions campaigns are becoming a marketing standard, thanks to smart phones and inexpensive broadband. Many people don’t bother with their radio or CDs anymore; they’re going digital, listening to their iPhones and Androids, plugging in their iPods to work out, or even listening to Internet radio stations on their laptops.

The most common approach to music promotions campaign is to use the typical mainstream music. But in some cases, you may find that independent music will work better for your music promotions campaign instead.

Rather than pay licensing fees to offer specific artists, or creating a generic campaign that offers iTunes money, work with local and indie bands and offer their music instead.

If you’re trying to reach a college age audience in certain cities, you can appeal to them by offering cuts from their favorite local bands. Not only are you helping promote your own brand by affiliating yourself with popular bands, but you have new partners in cross-promotion as well. Some of these bands may be willing to help promote your music promotions campaign themselves. After all, the more fans they can drive to your site, the more people they can expose to their own music as well.

Other indie music promotions ideas can include giving away tickets to local shows. Not only can you offer a sample song with your music promotion, but you could even create a loyalty program along the lines of “buy 20 cones, and get a ticket to the next Tripping Daisies show at the Dew Drop Inn.”

You can help sponsor local shows. Not only will your name be announced during the show, you can also attend the show and recruit customers there. Think about what the audience would really be into, and offer that as music promotions incentives: “Post a photo of you wearing our t-shirt to your Facebook page, and you could win free widgets for you and 4 friends.”

Create a video campaign. Encourage people to take videos of their favorite bands (at your sponsored shows, of course), and upload them to YouTube, then share them on Facebook and Twitter. In each message, the fans will need to include that it’s part of YOUR promotion, which will not only bring in viewers to their movies, but will reinforce your name. As a result, your customers will be doing your marketing for you — thousands of dollars of marketing value, all for the cost of partnering with a few favorite local indie bands.

By working with indie musicians and bands, you can not only localize your music promotions efforts, you can get some additional support from the bands you’re partnering with.

Digital promotions provide unique customer loyalty programs. This digital promotions powerhouse merges digital music and virtual promotions content, with entertainment licensing, and proprietary promotional risk coverage models, to deliver turnkey, fixed cost solutions for the promotional market.

Understanding Long Tail Brand Promotion

November 22nd, 2010 No comments

Long tail brand promotion could be one of the best friends of an Internet marketer, if they know how to use it properly.

Basically, long tail brand promotion uses special keywords and phrases on your website that potential buyers might use as search terms to find what they are searching for. They are the niche terms that will bring the most dedicated-to-purchase web surfers to your site. We will explore some specifics to give you a better idea.

Imagine you own an online flower shop. You can ship flowers all over the country, and you have your shiny new website living on a new server to handle the waves of traffic, and you are ready for the orders to start rolling in. But it is not that easy.

When someone searches for “send flowers,” what happens? Big sites and bigger companies that have the brand promotion resources to purchase paid search listings and advertising, such as Teleflora, ProFlowers, or 1-800-Flowers, dominate the search results. They constantly battle against each other to win that number one listing on Google and the other search engines. Your little flower shop and shiny new website does not have the resources to compete with these players on standard searches. So how would anyone ever see your site in the regular search results? The best answer is long tail brand promotion.

The problem is when people perform a search for terms like “send flowers” or “credit cards” or “new laptop,” they will find whoever could throw the most money and energy at online brand promotion. It is not necessarily the best site, or the exact thing they are looking for. So they continue to research until they find exactly what it is they need.

So when someone searches for terms like “Toshiba Satellite Pro L670,” or “credit card double points no fee U-Promise,” they know what they are looking for. They know when they type in “laptop,” they will not find what they need. But by being more specific, they may find the smaller website that offers just what they are looking for.

Those are the people you want at your flower site. So if you provide keywords with great specificity — the long tail brand promotion keywords — it is most likely the buyers who are using those keywords to show up at your site.

What does this have to do with our flower business? You know that with the flower giants, you cannot compete with them on terms like “send flowers” or “flower delivery.” You need to focus on long tail brand promotion keywords to beat the mega sites at their own game. Some online businesses have even changed their entire focus of what they do and sell just to focus on long tail brand promotion.

What if you offered a particular variety of flower that is fairly uncommon? Something the big flower stores do not carry. You could create special keyword phrases like “Angel Kiss rose pink” or “rare Japanese orchid” to set yourself aside from the big websites. Now your long tail brand promotion can gain a foothold, because you offer something the big sites do not offer.

You can then identify and build a variety of different long tail keywords for your brand promotion. While the mega sites fight to win the 98 percent of searches for regular flowers, you can win the other 2 percent of the searches by focusing only on the people who want the rare Japanese orchid, or the pink Angel Kiss rose.

By focusing on long tail brand promotion, you can build up a series of those 2 percent searches. Eventually, if you win enough long tail searches, you can run a fairly successful business that does not have to rely on big budgets and common search terms for its brand promotion. You fill the niche that a smaller dedicated customer base will rely on you for.

What Does Geolocation Social Networking Mean for Online Marketing?

November 19th, 2010 No comments

Online marketing works best in partnership with buzz worthy social promotions. The partnership between geolocation and social networking have had a positive impact on online marketing over the last couple years.

As search engines began to realize that a lot of search is local, sites like Google started focusing on local businesses. This has helped local business owners achieve higher rankings in search engines when users are in the same area as those businesses. Now social networks are taking their cue, and are focusing on geolocation, which helps local businesses boost their online marketing even more.

Location-based networks, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, are the leaders in this new online marketing social movement. Users “check in” to a location, telling their friends where they are. Businesses are taking advantage of geolocation by offering rewards programs to first-time visitors and loyal customers. Whether it’s freebies, giveaways, or discounts, the businesses who include geolocation in their online marketing are seeing a payoff.

Geolocation apps like Foursquare use GPS technology that has been built into our smartphones — iPhone, Android, Blackberry — and will allow users to check in to a location just by clicking a button, rather than entering the entire address by hand.

The great thing about geolocation is that it works for the typical customer, on the tool they carry with them everywhere. And as silly as it may seem, customers are eating it up, and enjoying the fun of geolocation. If they think it’s fun, they’ll participate. And if they participate, they’ll participate at your restaurant, store, or location.

Foursquare and Yelp, a restaurant review site, have even upped the ante by giving titles — mayor, duke, duchess — for repeat visitors. People go back to their favorite locations to earn that title. Imagine people coming to your restaurant again and again, just to earn a title someone else created.

Most recently, Facebook got into the act, offering Facebook Places as a tool to compete with Foursquare and Gowalla. Now, the largest social network in the world makes it possible for your customers to tell all their friends where they are, doing your online marketing for you.

Now, for good or bad, your online marketing is being taken out of your hands, and put into the hands of your customers. And because your customers’ friends trust them more than they trust any marketing you could ever do, the friends will want to try the places they keep hearing about — the places your customers keep visiting over and over, in order to win titles and rewards.

The net result of this new online marketing tool is lower marketing costs and higher profits. But only if you take advantage of it. Unique ideas on how you can launch social media marketing strategy for your company can be found here.

Rostin Ventures online marketing services include social media marketing, search engine optimization, and online reputation management. Local SEO services of geolocation marketing through social media, provides for higher search engine ranking within local search of business listings. Get listed in local search and found by consumers looking for your product and services at http://www.rostinventures.com

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5 Tips for Developing a Mobile Commerce Website

November 11th, 2010 No comments

Mobile commerce is set to take off, growing a huge 65% every year and reaching 7.7% of all digital commerce sales in 2015. Some retailers have already provided iPhone and other apps that let users shop for their wares digitally, while others have opted to create mobile websites instead. Big companies in the UK that went for apps include Debenham’s and Tesco’s, while M&S, Amazon, and John Lewis all decided on m-commerce sites rather than apps.

Those companies that opted for the mobile compatible website are more likely to attract mobile users. M-commerce websites are cheaper to develop than apps. They reach more customers because any mobile is compatible instead of just the one the app was designed for. They can also be found easily, perhaps through the parent site, whereas apps must first be found and then downloaded from an app store. Overall, the m-commerce site is the better way to go for retailers.

5 Tips for Developing a Mobile Commerce Website

1. Customers want the same sort of browsing and buying experience on the m-commerce version of the website that they find on the parent site. Therefore similar design methodology should be applied, while keeping in mind a mobile’s small screen size. Sometimes however, a smaller screen can be more effective marketing tool, as it forces providers to narrow down their sell.

2. Customers like to be able to find the exact same products and the same product availability as on the parent site, as well as the same access to specials on products. Full product specs should also be available, with quality photos included. There should be no real disadvantage to using the m-commerce version of the retailer’s site, even if it is visually more efficient than the main site.

3. The checkout process should be streamlined for mobile users. Don’t make registration compulsory before checkout, and be sure that there are only a few steps involved. Checkout should be smooth and pain-free.

4. Let users sort through products quickly, so they can find what they want fast. Good product filters are a must. Connection quality can be an issue for mobiles, so making it as easy as possible to find a product may be the difference between a sale and a lost opportunity.

5. When mobile users land on the parent site, automatically lead them to the m-commerce version of the site. This is the easiest way to promote it, and makes it simple for users to locate.

Adaptive Consultancy is a London based internet marketing firm specialising in website design, eCommerce, and internet marketing, including SEO, PPC and SMO. www.adaptiveconsultancy.com/e-commerce/m-commerce


Promote Your Website To Get The Visitors You Want

November 5th, 2010 No comments

With the online small business world there’s a saying which goes along the lines of something such as “traffic is the true secret.” Everybody knows in order to create product sales you have to have clients. On the net, the sole strategy to get customers is to have targeted visitors to your site. And in what ways will this take place? To be honest it can come about in numerous ways but some are worthless. We will talk about those types to start with…

Conceivably one of the most useless may be the arbitrary probability which a particular person is going to type the actual URL of your respective Internet site straight into there online browser. There really is no chance in anyway, unless there is an act of Our God mainly because, precisely why would they type anything at random? So individuals need to know exactly who you are or even exactly what your product is in order to make his or her way to your site.

In other words you must market in order to produce Internet site visitors. A somewhat effective method is actually to have a link upon another of your personal websites, or even someone else’s website. A small problem is, in order to get people to your web page there should be individuals visiting all those additional sites which once again needs advertising and marketing. Therefore “targeted traffic is the key” however marketing will be the main element to getting site visitors. Subsequently let us take a look at advertising and marketing at this point.

Web marketing is helped, actually, powered by the various search engines. Typically the higher you rank in the search engine for a given entry the more people are going to go to your site. For the reason that everyone is lazy and they don’t want to spend time in order to locate just what they want to find. What’s more, it is a good idea due to the fact that everyone believes that the actual top listings would be the most applicable to just what these people would like, and this method is actually the idea. So quality traffic is actually one of the keys, advertising will be one of the keys so that you can get traffic, and, positioning your site higher in the the major search engines is the main element to great advertising. So lets us take a look at website positioning now.

Search engine ranking is usually somewhat of a secret and whoever has figured out most of the particular secrets are the best at marketing on the web. Hyperlinks to various other Internet pages is good, keyword relevance is a useful one, and marketing a product that many people need will be good too. The other thing to keep in mind is that it’s useless to get lots of people visit your Internet site if they’re not really interested in what you will be marketing. This introduces the thought of targeted traffic, getting those who would like exactly what you have specifically, to your website.

Anyway, these kinds of “experts” who’ve been advertising online for years, love to hand out beneficial information, with a price tag, as well as tools that makes it less complicated to come up with effective sales pages. You can get link building programs on the Internet, along with other black hat strategies to driving traffic, but the one thing you will understand with time, is the fact that marketing with articles is actually the greatest and speediest methods to constructing good quality links aimed at your website. These types of links will stand the test of time, therefore lasting success along with targeted traffic coming from the search engines is really a possibility.

In the online small business world article marketing plays an important role in the success of a website. Utilizing the right article marketing services can help you in your article marketing efforts.


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PR Marketing: Top 3 Benefits of Business Press Releases

November 4th, 2010 No comments

Are you on the fence about launching a business PR marketing campaign? Hiring a PR company to write and distribute professional press releases is a great way to help promote your business online.

Although press releases have been around for decades, PR marketing has changed significantly over the past several years, as more and more networks have emerged to host business press releases online. Certain press release services can even include video and images, as well as custom anchor links and social media sharing buttons.

Let’s take a look at the top three benefits of this marketing strategy:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you’re looking to increase your page rank and site traffic through Search Engine Optimization, PR marketing is a must — even if you already have an off page SEO plan in place. With the right SEO keywords and press release distribution, your press releases can land on top news sites and RSS feeds, including Google and Yahoo! News, creating powerful backlinks — and even anchor text links — to your business. At the same time, the sheer volume of pages and feeds listing your headlines will allow you to dominate search results for certain keywords, with links to your press releases appearing in multiple spots at once.

2. Business Branding

What makes your company stand out from the rest? Business press releases can establish fast, effective branding to help separate your company from the competition. Depending on your press release writing goals, you can use your PR marketing campaign to showcase your company mission statement or service guarantee, promote new products and services, or celebrate important business landmarks. Plus, many press release services allow you to incorporate your company logo free of cost, allowing readers a helpful visual to remember your business.

3. Timely Advertising

Search engine optimization is a gradual process, but SEO is only one aspect of PR marketing. As stated above, business press releases lend themselves to conveying newsworthy information: seasonal products, industry news, company growth, and more. If you want to spread the word about a timely item of news, press release distribution is an extremely effective marketing technique, especially when combined with social networking on Facebook, Twitter and similar sites.

Of course, it’s important to remember the business PR marketing is only one component to successful online promotion. For the most effective online strategy, a business should invest in a combination of search engine optimization, Pay-Per-Click advertising, email marketing and social networking. Your specific business might not require all of these marketing techniques, but chances are that it could benefit from one or two.

PR United offers professional press release writing and distribution to top-tier sites like Google and Yahoo. Contact us today to sign up for affordable business PR marketing!

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Discover How to Get Started With Social Media Marketing

November 4th, 2010 No comments

Over the past few years the main focus for many small business and home based business owners have been on social media marketing. The great thing about social media for business is that it gives you a way to be in constant contact with past, current and future customers but there is a problem with it and that is the fact that many people who want to get started just cannot decide how and where to actually get started.

Most of these business owners know that they should be using tools such as Facebook and Twitter to connect and build relationships with people but they cannot work out how to do it so that their online businesses will benefit.

Let’s take a quick look at the best way to get started with social media marketing from a business point of view.

To begin with you must have a plan. This plan needs to incorporate not only how and where you intend setting up profiles but also the various methods you will use them on a daily basis.

So that you can set up a plan you must take a look at a variety of social sites and see what they have to offer. It is important to ascertain if your target market is active on any of these social sites and you can do this by checking out what your competition is using, as there is a good possibility that your competitors are already using some of these sites for their own online home based businesses, so by studying what they are doing is a good place to begin.

Once you have discovered which social sites would be best for you to be using your next step is to get your business profile on to each of these sites. Begin with the most popular ones such as Facebook and Twitter because with these it is highly unlikely that you will miss out on your target market.

After taking care of the larger and more popular sites you can then move on to some of the niche sites as well. When setting up your profile it is essential that you include a link back to your main website as well as a short introduction to what you and your online business is all about.

Remember that the main point of social websites is first and foremost the fact that they are social so it is very important that you don’t come across as someone who is only interested in pushing their business and making sales.

To be effective with any of these sites you must become engaged with your target market on a more personal rather than on a strictly business and sales level.

After joining and setting up your profile you will then need to find and join groups that are being used by your target market and you can do this by searching through the various groups that are available. While not all social media websites have groups there are a large majority of them that do. Along with these groups there could also be communities and the best way to find them is by becoming “friends” or “following” people who think and are in the same business as you are.

By discovering what they are talking about and doing you will be in a better position to see how the whole community interacts and once you get the feel of the tone of the community then you need to become engaged with them.

This is the point at which you must begin to add valuable information to the general discussion. Keeping this in mind you can in a very subtle and minimal way include a bit of a sales pitch. Your main purpose there is not to sell your products directly; the goal is to become known and brand yourself and by building good relationships that can give huge benefits well into the future both with customers and other online businesses.

If you follow these easy steps you will quickly and effectively integrate yourself and your online home based business into the social sites community.

Michelle Jayes writes articles aimed at helping people to build a successful online income business. Click here to follow her on Twitter or visit her website www.online-income-business.com


3 Ways To Make Money Online – Giving Away Free Stuff

November 4th, 2010 No comments

Believe it or not you can make money on the Internet giving things away. It is human nature for people to want to get something for nothing. This is why you see so many people trying to win things such as $! Million Dollars buying lottery tickets or playing a McDonald’s scratch game.

When it comes to making money online you can give away free stuff and turn them into an Internet income. Here are three ways you can do that.

1. Build your mailing list. Doing email marketing is a proven way to make money once you have a responsive list.

This is why you see so many Internet marketers giving away free ebooks, free reports, and access to free webinars. The trade off is the website visitor must give that Internet marketer their name and email address to receive access to the freebie they are offering.

Once you have a mailing list you can send offers out to it and sell products that earn you a commission. Affiliate marketing is a good place to get products that you can make money selling.

2. Take a free tour. This is a common tactic used in network marketing opportunities. You also see it in membership sites.

Let the prospect test the opportunity out for free for a certain period of time. In some opportunities they might charge $1 for one week and then if the prospect doesn’t cancel they are billed full price on a regular basis.

The idea is that if the opportunity is worthwhile letting them check it out before they have to pay is a good way to enroll new members. In network marketing you make more money when you build a large downline.

Once you have the few personal individual members enrolled, and they are working on building their own group, you can make a lot of money. Everyone uses the same strategy of giving away a free tour.

3. CPA Offers. This could be something as simple as having a website visitor provide their name and email address. There are actually cost per action offers that only require an email address for you to get paid.

You are not selling anything, but rather you are promoting a specific offer. Most affiliate companies that do this type of affiliate marketing have excellent landing pages that you can promote.

There is no cost to the website visitor and you earn money once they complete the specific action. You just spend your time marketing the landing page.

As you can see there are ways to make money online giving away free stuff. This is a proven strategy for doing Internet marketing that any one willing to work at can make money.

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Promotional risk covered promotions open up possibilities to offer larger prizes than most companies can afford, or would want to take promotional risk on. These large prizes are proven to increase registrations of online users, traffic in stores, and sales at any given time. Strategies including promotional risk coverage also build large brands through consumer loyalty. Everyone appreciates winning something, people enjoy watching others win, and everyone remembers who was offering the big prize.

Protect your company from  the promotional risk of over redemption on free promotional offers.


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Some Rudimentary Guidelines For Excellent Business Card Design

November 3rd, 2010 No comments


There are certain things you need to take into account to make professional looking business cards. Below are some guidelines to ensure your business cards look professional and contain all the information that is needed. To make your business card even more unique, remember to include a slogan. Make your slogan short so it is easy for people to remember. A good slogan is something that people will remember when they think of your company. It is also vital that all your contact details be included on your card. The easier it is for the clients to get hold of you, the better it is for business. Also include your business logo and make sure it is prominent.

It is vital that the contact information you put on your card is up to date. Your contact information consists of your name and e-mail address, telephone numbers and any extension numbers if used. It is also important to provide a business address as well as a fax number. Never provide contact information that you don’t want your clients using. Never give a private number if you don’t want clients calling you on that number. Don’t give an e-mail address unless you are consistent about checking your mail regularly. Likewise, if you are not very good at answering your cell phone, don’t include the number. Most importantly the contact information should be correct and helpful to the clients.

The color and composition of your cards is another important element to consider when designing your cards. Making sure the color and composition of your business card design is correct is very important to the way that clients view your business. Graphic design is a very temperamental thing and sometimes the smallest thing can make all the difference. Always use a white background when possible. A white background will give you a good base to work on as it is simple and safe and works well with the majority of designs. You can also use black if you don’t have another option. Also remember that nothing says amateur as a bad font choice. Making use of funny looking fonts is not advisable as they tend to make the business card look like it was designed by an amateur. It is best to stick to the basic, well known fonts like Ariel and Roman.

Also, stay away from strange or wacky colors and combinations of these colors. You should never use more than three colors on your business card, and sticking to black on white is usually the best option. Color restriction is the best option when using color in business card designs. To finish, don’t try and be bold. Using a simple design will get the message across much easier. Trying to be bold in one of the most common mistakes in design composition. Make sure that there is enough white space in your design with clearly legible text. If you follow the above mentioned guidelines, you can be assured that your business card will be a great asset to your business as a marketing tool.

Hector Montgomery is a professional if you want more information on business card design. To understand all the details with regard to corporate video production, explore the world wide web site located at – Personal Visual


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Promotional Incentives: Is “Free” Effective?

October 28th, 2010 No comments

Promotional Incentives capitalize on the consumer’s insatiable desire for all things free. Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of “The Long Tail,” has turned the idea of “free” on its head with his new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.”

In it, he talks about how “free” is often used as promotional incentives. “Free” is often an integral part of marketing promotional incentives, used as a way to get people to try our products, to buy something else, to showcase our products or services, and even to do some work for us.

Here are the four basic iterations of “free” Anderson discusses in his book.

* Direct cross-subsidies – These are promotional incentives that get you to pay for something else. It could be a buy-one-get-one-free item at your favorite clothing store, or a free “prize” given to you by a car dealership in the hopes of getting you to buy a new car. It could even be a cell phone company giving you a free cell phone because you’ll pay for the minutes, the text plan, and the data package.

* The Three-Party Market – With three-party promotional incentives, someone else pays for you to have access so you can use the program or product, in order for you to be exposed to their product — your basic television and radio mass media setup. I get to watch NBC’s “The Office” for free, but I have to watch the ads that go with it. Or I can subscribe to a free trade magazine that covers my industry, but with these promotional incentives, I have to make my name and address available to advertisers. The advertisers need us to consume that product, but we need the advertisers to pay for our access.

* Freemium – One of the promotional incentives we’re most familiar with: we get a free sample to try a product: the food samples we get at our local supermarket, as a way to entice us to buy the really huge bag of pizza rolls. Or in the digital world, giving us limited access so we’re willing to pay full price for total access. Anderson mentions Flickr.com as an example of the freemium promotional incentives. We can use Flickr for free, but can only include 200 photos in our general timeline. If we want to have all of our photos available, and/or we want some premium features, we need to pay $25 per year.

* Nonmonetary markets – The idea that people give away things with no expectation of payment is not one of your regular promotional incentives. Wikipedia is one example. Hundreds of volunteers have created millions of articles in 10 languages about a variety of topics. Wikipedia doesn’t charge for this access, it’s free. Sure, they’ll take donations, and in fact, this past Spring, they had a donation drive to help cover the costs. But there’s nothing else. No banner ads (three-party market), no limited access (freemiums), and no direct cross-subsidies (“get Wikipedia free if you buy a copy of Photoshop”).

It’s this last version of “free” that most people are becoming used to, which can make your own promotional incentives campaign a success. Since marketing promotional incentives in the digital world is cheap and easy, there are different ways people can use them to promote their services (i.e. a Freemium).

One example of promotional incentives is when a consultant posts free articles on her blog as a way to not only showcase their knowledge, but to get a potential client to consider them. Or a book author who offers a free audio version of his book on iTunes and a Kindle version, knowing that if people get the free version, they’re more likely to pay for a real copy too. This is one of the latest promotional incentives to hit the publishing world, and one that more and more authors are using to boost their own sales.

What kind of promotional incentives are you using to drive customer traffic? How are you getting sales leads? Have you thought of using free items as a way to do this? Consider all of the options when you launch your own promotional incentives campaign.