5 Online Marketing Strategy Questions That Must Be Answered
There are many people who offer online marketing services. There are also many people who call themselves online marketing experts because they know how to:
- Build a WordPress website
- Implement search engine optimization (SEO)
- Set up your Google Places page and other local business listings
- Develop an AdWords campaign
- Send out an email marketing campaign
- Create a Facebook Business Page with the new iFrames landing tabs
All good stuff and important. But do these experts know marketing? Can they help you determine:
Which online marketing components are the best options for your business?- Who your target market is and how to best reach them?
- How your customers search for your products and services?
- What strategies (see diagram) are needed and which activities will be the most practical and successful given your time and resource constraints?
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Three WordPress Plugins for More Effective Online Marketing
Most small business marketing is done online where first impressions, relevant content and social media integration are key requirements for achieving visibility, which ultimately should result in quality inbound leads. Your website, which is the hub of your online presence, needs to be created on a platform that makes it easy for you to maintain, add new content and keep it fresh for your ideal clients. WordPress is the website platform of choice because it enables small businesses to achieve a quality, professional web presence that is easy and cost-effective to update and maintain.
What makes WordPress easy to use and maintain is the inclusion of WordPress plugins, created by a network of developers, that extend the basic WordPress platform with complex functionality without custom development. The following are three WordPress plugins that extend the platform to include features critical to your online marketing:
What do these plugins have to do with marketing?
- You need to optimize your site to be found
- You need a strong call-to-action on each page of your site with an associated form to encourage people to contact you (inbound leads are the best)
- You want prospects to see reviews from your very happy customers on your website (and other review sites too)
Let’s take a look at them in a bit more detail. Read more on Three WordPress Plugins for More Effective Online Marketing…
10 Marketing Tips for Gaining Online Visibility
Here are my top 10 marketing tips for small businesses that will help you gain more visibility with your target customer.
- Create a vision and set realistic goals for your business. What’s that have to do with marketing, you ask? Knowing your vision will help you make decisions on what types of activities you will need to get where you’d like to go. Goals break the process into smaller pieces to allow you to get there one step at a time. Without a vision and a set of goals, you may make some decisions that lead you nowhere.
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Lead Generation: What Works Today
I recently presented a workshop at the New England Business Brokers Association meeting about how to integrate online and social media marketing for lead generation. As professional service business owners, we build our credibility by demonstrating our expertise and knowledge of our discipline and the use of social media makes building your reputation much simpler than before.
As a small business owner, how you approach online marketing can make the difference between a successful campaign and an overwhelming exercise. Learning how to use online marketing to drive visitors to your Website and generate leads is going to impact your marketing and ultimately the success of your business.
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Tags: internet marketing system, online lead generation, online marketing
Personal Brand or Online Reputation
Whatever you call it, you still need to manage it!
There’s a lot of conversation about the term personal brand. My favorite personal brand is Bono (no surprise here), but Tom Brady, Madonna, J. Lo, Manny Ramirez, Britney Spears and many other celebritites all have personal brands – some good and some not so good at times.
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Tags: differentiation, online marketing, online reputation, social media profiles
Baby Boomers Not Interested in Social Media
According to a survey of 1800 people in the baby boomer generation (born in 1946 through 1964) by ThirdAge/JWT Boom, people over age 40 participate heavily in word-of-mouth and value personal recommendations and expert opinions, but they have not embraced social networking or blogs despite being heavy users of other online services.
