Posts Tagged online
Improve Your Small Business’ Online Advertising
Posted by Patrick Woods in Interactive on
According to this article about online advertising, American consumers spend almost 4 hours a day using online media, accounting for about a third of a typical American’s media usage each day.
In light of this behavior, does your small business marketing plan account for this behavior? Does your small business take advantage of the opportunities the online media provide for connecting with your target audience?
Take a few minutes to read these tips for online advertising and how you make it work for your small business.
Intentional Online Advertising
Posted by Patrick Woods in Interactive on
A fatal mistake many small business owners make when trying their hand at online advertising is that they don’t invest in creative designed specifically for that medium. Banner ads are often smaller versions of a print campaign without any regard to the behavior of online audiences.
But would you use a newspaper ad for your outdoor display? Would you air your radio spot as a TV commercial?
Interactive advertising provides a near limitless set of choices for a small business that’s advertising online. This article offers a few examples of how companies are already thinking intentionally about their online advertising campaigns. Small businesses owners would benefit from this kind of approach.
Social Media Marketing: Are You Sharing Information About Your Small Business on Twitter?
Posted by Patrick Woods in Social Media Marketing on
The new rule of conversational politeness: If you don’t have something nice to say, go to the Internet and let the whole world know. The Internet offers the small business owner the chance to market and sell to customers around the world, but the trade-off is that the same medium that allows worldwide commerce also provides the platform for global brand-bashing.
In just minutes, an angry customer can rant on blogs and post negative reviews on websites and forums, compromising your years of hard marketing work. Social networks have only enabled this process.
Many marketers feared Twitter, with it’s massive size and ability to Retweet interesting information, would provide the ideal medium for brand abusers to spread their spew. But is Twitter really the unbridled hate-fest many online marketing types have always suspected.
No.
This study by Pennsylvania State University found that only 22.3 percent of Tweets actually involved brand sentiment, and of those sentiment-related tweets, only about 34 percent involved negative sentiment. In all the tweets analyzed, few than 7 percent of all tweets contained negative brand sentiment.
Additionally, almost 30 percent of tweets involved information seeking or providing information to others. Despite the 140-character limit on tweets, members of your small business’ target audience are engaging in conversations directly related to companies and brands.
Small Business Social Media Conversations
What does this mean for your small business? It’s good news! Social media, it seems, is delivering on the hype of 2-way marketing conversations.
Find your target audience and engage them. You customers want to hear how your small business can make their lives easier or more fulfilling.
Build social media marketing into your overall marketing strategy and begin to meet your customers where they already are.
Online Video Marketing for Small Businesses
Posted by Patrick Woods in Interactive on
Photo by El Mariachi 94
The advent of low-cost high-quality video cameras, affordable or free editing software, and global video distribution channels like YouTube has given small business owners the chance literally to reach the world with their content message.
The learning curve may be high, but depending on your goals and objectives and your content marketing strategy, the payoff of a great video series can be priceless.
So you may have some big questions about how a small business can use online video as a marketing strategy: what are the benefits of video? what are the do-it-yourself options? how will people hear about it?
This article from Entrepreneur offers plenty of great advice for starting your online video marketing program.
Small Business Website: Product Order Affects Purhcase Rate
Posted by Patrick Woods in Interactive on
Do you have a strategy for placement of items on your small business website? Would you believe that the the placement of a product’s image in a horizontal list of similar items has an effect on that product’s sales?
Read this insightful article on how an item’s placement can increase its sales by 2.5 per cent over other items in the list.
Finding Stunning Imagery for Your Small Business Blog
Posted by Patrick Woods in Advertising and Design, Interactive on
Interesting and relevant image can be used to increase the visual appeal of your small business blog while making it seem more readable by breaking-up the text.
Flickr is a fantastic source for usable images. Here is a great article on how to use Flickr images on your blog.
Understanding Interactive Marketing’s ROI
Posted by Patrick Woods in Interactive on
AdAge has posted a thorough article written by Eric Karofsky, principal consultant in the strategy group at interactive agency Molecular, about the difficulty in justifying spending on digital and interactive media.
He frames his thoughts in the form of a conversation between a CFO, who demands proof of ROI before spending a dime, and a CMO, who insists interactive media isn’t always about tangible ROI.
Despite the theoretical framework of this discussion, small businesses will benefit from considering ways in which interactive media can support their marketing objectives. For many small businesses, the owner is both the CFO and the CMO, so the discussion may be internal, but important nonetheless.
Traditional small business owners may apply dated paradigms when considering how to allocate their media buys, but this article offers a balanced approached to understanding the various metrics involved in measuring the effectiveness of interactive marketing.
