Online Marketing for Marketers

Social networks are all the rage and many of my posts at OnlineMarketerBlog recommend social tools for businesses. However, there are potential pitfalls to consider before you facilitate interaction between customers and your business.

Here are 21 things your business should consider before starting a social network:

Internal (Your Business Capabilities)

1. Can you invest the necessary resources to run a social network properly? Can you afford the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars it takes to properly create and staff this resource?

2. What is the role of marketing, sales, IT, customer service, advertising, HR, etc.? Social networks often delve into all of these departments and more. Make sure all of your teams are engaged, enthused, and prepared. Read more

One out of five US email marketers send additional emails to subscribers after confirming an unsubscribe request, according to the new study Keeping the Subscriber Experience Positive After “Unsubscribe Me”  from Return Path.  A very poor practice, indeed, and a lesson for marketers in every nation. If someone requests off your file, please let them off without any troubles. Further the study found that 11% of the companies studied emailed subscribers more than 10 days after confirming an unsubscribe request - a violation of the US federal CAN-SPAM Act. Read more

Ok, perhaps the headline is a bit overdramatic, but the point here is that companies tend to focus far too much on staying within a set budget line for their online initiatives to the detriment of driving an acceptable amount of qualified traffic. This common, albeit myopic, tactic will drive marketers right out of a job.

Any promotion campaign – but particularly online ones – must first and foremost deliver returns for a company’s investment. This is where the true value of such initiatives lies; if they bear sizeable fruit, it would stand to reason that an organization should look at putting more resources toward them, and consider going over budget to capitalize on their full potential. That isn’t to say that corporations need to write a blank check to advertising outlets, but it does mean that adherence to an arbitrary dollar figure should not come at the expense of customer growth and market share. Doing so leaves significant money on the table. Read more

Anybody feeling good about the economy these days?  With so much pressure to perform, it’s hard to “envision the future” or even get your arms around 2009 planning.

Here’s two things you can do now, in Q4, for immediate impact, that will not only help you improve results, but will help you feel good about your planning efforts (and keep your job safe).  Read more

In the past, I’ve explored how the state of today’s Social Media tools may be turning off some Social Networkers. I suggested that the future of Social Media cannot be assessed based on today’s immature tools but must be viewed in the context of the concepts and tools that will revolutionize personal communication in the years to come.

So what might the future look like? It certainly won’t be the jumble of independent, overlapping, and unreliable tools that we have today. Let’s imagine a Social Media future and then consider how we might take actions now that will better prepare us for this future. Read more

There are a couple extremely important components you need to have in place to achieve Web marketing success. Without them, your chance for failure is great. Make the jump over to this post to watch this video to learn what they are.
Read more

I’ve been following The Marketing Technology Blog by Douglas Karr, and I’m in awe of him and his natural blogging ability. He blogs on his topic daily, sometimes more, and produces really well thought out posts. As a result, he has built a strong following on his blog that is rivaled by very few. And he’s done it in record time!

I decided to reach out to Doug Karr and interview him on a podcast to bring you some key learnings on how to build the audience for your blog. Enjoy …

Read more

I always tell people (or at least ones I hope won’t tell another soul!) that you don’t have to be a professional or full-time copywriter to write good copy.

And it’s true: With more and more marketers, entrepreneurs, business owners, consultants and others doing a little bit of everything when it comes to their marketing, a little knowledge and advice can go a long way.

(Most copywriters wouldn’t want you to know this….but with the right tools and techniques, anyone can write copy well enough to be, well, dangerous.)

Read more

The ‘Get a Mac’ ad features two men standing side by side in front of a seamless, gray/white background. “Hello, I’m a Mac,” says the young guy on the right. “And I’m a PC,” says the guy on the left (sporting dorky glasses, business casual khakis, and a jacket / tie).

This well known, highly successful ad campaign from Apple promoting their Mac computers against Microsoft’s PC is closing in on its’ third year. Apple has attempted to cement the perceived wide gulf between the PC/Mac in terms of ease of setup, use and operating system stability and security - see Vista vs Mac OS spot. Or see the South Park version here.  Read more

When marketing planning gets complicated, I always suspect that, somehow, the essentials have gone wrong. I’ve seen elaborate edifices of media buying, graphic design, brand strategy and more built on the most threadbare understanding of fundamentals: who your customers are and what they want.

But when the fundamentals are solid — you know your customers and what makes them tick —  your actual execution can be quite simple.

Read more