Your mobile marketing campaign should be targeted and timed to reach people who are actively sharing their location online. Here are a few tips to get you started:

• Identify the geographic areas you cover. If you have a service business that travels (for example carpet cleaning or landscape maintenance), you can specify on Facebook Places, Foursquare, Yelp or Google Places which areas you service. The same idea can be applied to any geographically focused business.
• Ensure your complete mobile marketing asset mix is connected and optimize your website for mobile devices.  An easy-to–navigate, mobile friendly site is essential rather than just optional, and your site must provide easy access to the social network services where clients can check in and view your offers.
• Of course your location(s) must be “check-in” worthy. Ask yourself if you would check-in to your location a second time.
• Permit customers to opt in for offers and newsletters. Some will refuse to disclose personal information such as their interests and their location, but others won’t mind. So give them the option.
• Once a client has opted in, you must explain exactly (in your privacy policy!) how you intend to use the personal information you gather, to address their concerns regarding privacy.
• Offer valuable deals. Present them to your subscribers, as well as deal services such as Living Social and Groupon. Ask specifically to participate in their instant deals.
• Make opting out simple.Locking customers into a program will only annoy them.  Your goal is to keep your customers happy, loyal and eager to buy from you

When your mobile marketing campaign is grounded in an understanding of client interests it becomes a valuable business tool and provides great ROI to your internet marketing budget.

LinkedIn is fast becoming the premier tool for forging and nurturing business relationships online, yet many entrepreneurs resist establishing a presence on LinkedIn, perhaps because they aren’t clear on the benefits of leveraging this giant of networking.  Are you LinkedIn?

More than 135 million people and over seven million companies are now on LinkedIn, that’s a huge resource!  Simply creating a company page (which takes around fifteen minutes) and a personal profile will get you started.  Then you can begin to use LinkedIn’s power to achieve your professional goals.

• Do you want to establish yourself as an expert in your field?  Create a company blog that allows you to demonstrate your expertise, and answer questions, (look under the “more” tab, selecting those topics in which you are knowledgeable) a proven strategy for positioning you or your business as the go-to resource in your niche.
• Ask your satisfied customers for a recommendation and post these on the products and services page on your LinkedIn company page.
• If you have any PowerPoint presentations about your companies products or services you can upload them (just install the slideshare application into your personal profile).
• Use LinkedIn’s advanced search to research connections and target customers for business development.
• You can track and research your competition on LinkedIn, and
• Search for people with skills and experience to help your business grow.

These are only a few of the many different ways to leverage the power of LinkedIn.  If you’re not sure where to start, ask us – WSI Marketing can help you establish a presence on LinkedIn that will help you achieve your business goals.

In a recent column, searchengineland’s Erin Everhart talks about how to get citations for local SEO.  Citations are references that function much as links do for organic listings, and the more consistent citations your business has, the better your local rankings will be.

Why is it important to rank well in local listings?  Because over 20% of searches on Google are for local businesses and that number doubles on mobile devices!  SERPs are catering to these local searches by returning more local listings which also pushes the organic listings further down the page.

So how do you make sure that your business shows up when a potential client does a local search for your product or service?

The obvious place to start is GooglePlaces; create your page and make sure all the info is accurate.  Then set up a page on every local directory you can find, with information that is consistent across all of them.  Industry directories like Urban Spoon and Open Table (for restaurants) can be located by searching on “City + industry”.

These are some of the largest general directories in which you should be listed:

• Yelp
• Superpages
• City Search
• Yellow Pages
• Angie’s List
• Yahoo Local
• Trip Advisor
• Merchant Circle
• Dex Knows
• Insider Pages
• Localeze
• Shop City
• Judy’s Book
• Yellow Bot
• Kudzo

Social Media Listings

Your social media applications (Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Google+) should contain complete contact info.

Local Blogs

Any local blogs, especially those within your industry, can provide another place to list your business.

Competitor’s Listings

Check out where your competitors are listed, you may turn up more places to list your business information.

Local Newspapers

Some local newspapers will also have a business listing database that you can submit your information to, and don’t forget your local chamber of commerce.

Again, it’s critical that all these listings are consistent, for example; if your address is 123 Spruce Place, and you enter it that way on your Google Places page, you must always enter it that way elsewhere, not 123 Spruce Pl. or 123 Spruce Plc.

A little effort put into local SEO can go a long ways towards helping your clients and prospects find your business.

The Machiavellian quote exhorts you to “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”.  This hackneyed saying might be a little overused but as with many cliches there is truth buried within.  You may have had some success with your internet marketing strategies but there is always room for improvement.  And one way to improve is to learn how competitor analysis can help your business grow.

Online competitors have greater access to each other’s information and marketing strategies than those competing in the offline world leading to almost endless opportunities to benefit from competitive analysis data.

Whether you are chasing your competition or it’s the other way around, an understanding of their online marketing strategies will benefit you.  And if your competitors are surpassing you with their internet marketing campaigns you should really take a look at how they are doing that.

Measuring the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors allows you to identify opportunities and threats so that you can better target your marketing message and protect your business from competitive blindspots.

There are a number of tools that we use to dig deeper into your competitors’ web presence to discern what is successful for them and the areas in which their marketing strategy is weak.

Analysis of a competitor’s online business demands a thorough examination of all their web properties including websites and blogs, their Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and any other social media presence.

This analysis will help you to identify what specific actions you need to take in order to improve your competitive position.  If you want to learn more, ask WSI Marketing how competitor analysis can help your business!

A recent survey from the lead generation company MerchantCircle/Reply.com finds that SEO tops the list of marketing channels for small and medium businesses.

They asked 2,500 businesses this question:

“If you had to put all your marketing time and budget into only one channel, what would it be?”

Slightly less than 80 percent of respondents were businesses with fewer than four employees and more than half (63 percent) had annual marketing budgets that didn’t exceed $2,500.  The results:

The response is not particularly surprising, except perhaps for the strength of traditional media (which would include newspapers, yellow pages, direct mail and traditional radio).  Perhaps the constraint of limiting your marketing to one category pushed some businesses to fall back to the traditional methods with which they are familiar.

But SEO remains the clear leader here.  Maybe because IT WORKS!  Marketing your product and service is, first and foremost, about getting it in front of potential customers, and SEO has proven effective at increasing visibility and helping your prospects find you.

This study is interesting, but I have to ask…why would you limit your marketing efforts to just one channel?  It’s unlikely that I would recommend this strategy to a client and renders the survey a little less than useful IMHO.

Anyone who glances at the survey without reading the proposal carefully could come away with the (incorrect) opinion that channels like mobile marketing, paid search advertising and social media are unpopular with many businesses and perhaps unworthy of their attention.

One of the foremost benefits of internet marketing is how easy it is to employ a number of marketing channels and how well they interact to boost each others’ performance.  Responsiveness, interactivity, measurability and accountability make multi-channel internet marketing strategies a powerful driver for online business.  SEO tops the list, but don’t limit yourself!

Everybody says so, which must mean it’s true…  Social proof is the phenomenon where people assume the actions of others reflect correct behavior for a given situation.  Understanding exactly how this works is invaluable to marketers because it can influence behaviours and drive business.  The question is; how can your business benefit from social proof?

Social proof, also known as informational social influence, can be seen in the tendency of large groups to conform to choices either correct or mistaken and is sometimes referred to as herd behaviour.

How does social proof work?

Robert Cialdini, Regents’ Professor of Psychology and Marketing, Arizona State University and a team of colleagues ran an experiment to see which types of signs would most encourage Arizona hotel visitors to reuse towels. They tested four types of signs:

1. Cited environmental reasons to encourage visitors to reuse their towels
2. Said the hotel would donate a portion of end-of-year laundry savings to an environmental cause
3. Said the hotel had already given a donation and asked: “Will you please join us?”
4. Said the majority of guests reused their towels at least once during their stay

They discovered the percentage of those who reused towels per request was:

1. 38%
2. 36%
3. 46%
4. 48%

When guests found out that most people who stayed in the same hotel reused their towels, they were more likely to comply with the request.

“What’s most interesting to me,” Cialdini says, “is that the most effective strategy was entirely costless to the hotel. But I’ve never seen it used by any hotel room in any city.”

How to Build your Social Proof

There are numerous methods to build social proof, and every business must discover what works best for them.  And of course, you need to have a great product or service for people to recommend.  Get your product in front of the right influencers, and make it easy for people to share their opinions and recommendations through social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, solicit testimonials from happy customers on sites like Customer Lobby and reviews at local search directories like:

• Google Places;
• Yahoo Local;
• Yelp;
• Merchant Circle, and
• CitySearch

Don’t forget niche review sites.  For example; hotels really value great reviews on sites like:

• Expedia;
• Trip Advisor, and
• Travelocity.

The flip side of social proof is that negative reviews can do a lot of damage to your brand and business, especially if you don’t address them quickly and properly.  Your customers are going to hold you to account, so monitor your social media, local search and review sites and respond promptly.

As long as you are selling a great product or service you will garner great ROI from your social media and review sites as your social proof builds with positive input from your best marketers…your customers!

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have passed and we are deep into the 2011 holiday shopping season.  How are your sales?  Retail and service industry businesses often depend on this sales period for a good bump in business; for some it’s critical to have strong sales in December.

Don’t neglect digital marketing!

As more consumers are shopping online for gifts, travel and other holiday expenditures you can’t afford to ignore ecommerce, or to put a lackluster effort into your digital marketing campaign.  Your competitors aren’t!

People are increasingly using the internet to search for products and services, compare prices and buy and those businesses who invest in their online marketing strategies are reaping the rewards.

And for those who think that just being present online is enough, you might discover that you’re losing ground to competitors who are more aggressively marketing online.  In today’s challenging economy, failure to take full advantage of online business channels could prove fatal to your business.  We don’t want to see that!

For an analysis of your digital marketing plan including your entire web presence (website, social media, mobile media, SEO and SEM) contact the experts at WSI.  We can help you make the most of the holiday shopping season.

In the previous post I talked about where your digital marketing focus might be directed, and about how studies indicate that search engine optimization (SEO) outperforms pay-per-click (PPC) when it comes to lead generation.  Yet many marketers plan to invest more in their social media marketing budget than in either SEO or PPC…why?

Maybe it’s because of information like that discovered in the 2011 Cisco Connected World Technology Report.  This year, the report examined two new groups of subjects:

• College students, and
• Recently employed college graduates, many working in their first full-time jobs

The depth of this focus group’s connectivity, while amazing, is not really surprising to me.  Even though I’m well outside of this group, possessing a couple or more decades of life experience, my own desire for access to the internet and specifically social media has grown exponentially.

Cisco’s study found that:

“One in three college students and young professionals consider the Internet to be as important as air, water, food, and shelter. The study also found that their desire to use social media, mobile devices, and the Internet more freely in the workplace is strong enough to influence their future job choice, sometimes more than salary.”

It’s a little shocking to me that a person would place the access to social media, mobile devices and the internet above salary, but apparently many people do!

Some highlights of the study show that:

• Many respondents claim a mobile device as “the most important technology” in their lives;
• 7 of 10 employees have “friended” their coworkers and managers on Facebook;
• Most respondents have a Facebook account and check it at least once a day;
• Almost half would accept a lower-paying job providing more flexibility with regard to device choice, social media access, and mobility than a higher-paying job with less flexibility, and
• At least 1 in 4 said the absence of remote access would influence their job decisions, such as leaving companies sooner rather than later, slacking off, or declining job offers outright.

While this may seem a little unrealistic to those of us who have been in the workforce for a long time, it does illustrate how expectations are changing, and how crucial connectivity and access to social media is to a younger workforce.

And marketers with foresight are ready to use this knowledge to help their clients forge better connections with their clients and prospects.  Perhaps you should consider expanding your digital marketing campaign into social media marketing so that you can connect with these highly connected people.

A recent survey of online marketers (from Webmarketing 123) has found that search engine optimization (SEO) generates more leads than both social media marketing and pay per click advertising, for both B2B and B2C marketers.

Interestingly, many of these marketers report that they intend to increase their social media marketing budgets past both SEO and PPC in the coming year.  These people obviously feel there’s untapped potential in social media marketing that they wish to capitalize on.

What does this mean for your business? 

Maybe it’s time to step back and take a good look at your entire digital marketing plan.  Assess what is working for you, and what isn’t.  Surveys like these might give you some direction, but each business is different and it’s important to figure out which methods help you meet your goals best, whether you are:

• Selling a product or service;
• Want people to sign up for a newsletter or a free trial, or
• Promoting your brand.

Of course for most businesses, it’s about finding the right balance, usually with a mix of SEO, SEM and social media marketing.  Together they can amplify traffic to your web presence, and conversions.

When it’s time for your business to revamp its digital marketing plan (and it probably is) get some help from the professionals at WSI.  We can help you decide if SEO beats PPC for your business and get great ROI for your digital marketing budget.

As per the previous post, a well-managed pay-per-click (PPC) campaign targets your clients and prospects just as they are looking for your products and services and can lead to increased traffic to your web presence.  But then what?  Converting PPC traffic into completed goals is the next step of your digital marketing campaign.

Whether you want people to buy something, sign up for a newsletter or for a free trial, you need an effective landing page that will persuade them to complete your goal.

When they click on your ad and are taken to your landing page it’s critical that the benefits of your proposition are clear and the path to conversion simple and quick.

If they have to sift through a mountain of text or click through six more pages to get to what they want it probably won’t happen.  Remember, if they’re clicking on an ad they’re already halfway to conversion, so make the rest easy for them!

And it goes without saying that functionality is as important as clarity, broken links and messed-up pages won’t inspire any confidence in your business and people will abandon your online presence in favour of those that are clearer and function well.

There’s plenty of competition online these days, so you can’t afford to be lackadaisical about your digital marketing campaign.  PPC advertising can be a great way to grow your business, but don’t neglect to follow up with a great landing page to be successful converting PPC traffic.  Your WSI consultant can help!