Since the internet revolution, all offline publicity such as newspapers, magazines and advertisements on television have moved into the online realm. We now use all of the mediums via the internet. One of these transformations has been the use of email marketing which is a marketing strategy we utilize for a company to increase sales and brand recognition.

The main objective of this strategy is to generate brand loyalty, quality and recognition to new customers as well as those that have been around for a lifetime through email marketing. Through targeted emails, we offer promotional offers, special sales and events that would be of interest to customers.

How does a business come across customer emails or potential customer emails? One could purchase an email list or create an email database from existing customers. Have you ever received a promotional email from a company or brand that you purchase from? Now you know how they found you. If you happen to not want to receive emails from those companies, one can always unsubscribe from their list. There are laws that protect the consumer and their desire to be removed from any email list and that protect your privacy.

Want to create an email marketing campaign? Here are some tips to get you started the right way:

Do not send emails to any users that have not given you permission to do so or have already signed up voluntarily. Your message can go straight to the trash and even worse than that, create a bad image in the mind of that potential or existing customer. Offer discounts, specials, prizes, contests, promotions and surveys. This creates value and lots of buzz about your company and brand. Create emails that sound human and not like they came of out of a can. Be human, and your customer will respond in kind. We all like to purchase products from friendly companies, think Apple. Use a recognizable return email address, one that preferably includes the name of your company. Nothing spells spam more than a fishy return email. Keep the titles and subjects of your emails simple and easy to understand. Let your customer know you are a serious company. The design of your email should be simple and easy to understand. Do not make it too busy or your reader and customer will be turned off. Also include two very important links in each email, one to allow each reader to share the message with a friend and the other

It’s always important as a final step to review and analyze all the stats from each email marketing campaign to see what worked and what didn’t. This was each email can be better and more effective than the last. In this way, you can practically guarantee success in any campaign.

The ultimate compliment to any company is when the general public, or the vast majority, begins to use one of its brand names to define an entire product category. Here is a list of eight brand names you probably use as a genericized trademark to define an entire product category:

1. Kleenex

Although Kleenex also makes paper towels, bath tissues and diapers, their brand name is used synonymously to define the entire facial tissue industry. Even generic facial tissues, which typically dont have the same high quality, get the compliment of being called a Kleenex.

2. Popsicle

Since the introduction of Popsicle 1922, the brand name has grown to define the entire ice pop industry and has even expanded into a state of being – Since my heater broke, Ive been a popsicle all winter. Ok, so maybe thats a stretch Maybe not

3. Tupperware

Every holiday season, my mom reminds me to bring home some Tupperware so that I can take home leftovers. I actually dont own any Tupperware, but the brands name has become the staple name for the vast majority of plastic storage containers. Its wonderful for Tupperware, but Im sure the marketers at Rubbermaid hate when they hear their products called by another brand name.

4. Coke (Coca-Cola)

As the worlds best known soda, the brand name Coke dominates the cola industry. Enough said.

5. Google

“Just Google it” has become a common phrase to tell people to perform an online search. When “Google” first began to be used as a verb, you could almost hear the executives at Yahoo and Ask crying in their offices. Will Google continue to dominate, or do you think it is possible that 10 years from now “Just Bing it” will be the popular saying? I doubt it, but kudos to Microsoft for their efforts.

6. Xerox

Xerox is another brand-name-turned-verb. As the original manufacturer of plain paper photocopiers, the brand name is often used as a synonym for photocopy.There a numerous companies that make plain paper photocopiers now-a-days, but none that can rival Xerox s dominance as a the photocopy verb.

7. Starbucks

Starbucks has stores all over the world and has quickly become a household name for coffee. Maybe its because of their rapid growth or the fact that they make delicious coffee, but many people no longer say Lets grab a coffee, rather, they say Lets grab a Starbucks. Heres a great picture of Starbucks that I took last year in England:

8. Ziploc

People dont just put thing into sandwich bags, they put them into Ziploc bags. And, although they are public enemy number one to many environmentalists, the brand name continues to hold its title as sandwich bag king.

Social media marketing is one of the hottest topics in the internet marketing arena, and the reason is simple: more traffic, better brand recognition. Search engines are also beginning to realize that social websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and Pinterest are the future so they are using them in their ranking factors. Furthermore, they know that billions of users of mobile devices around the world are using social media sites to access a huge amount of information every single day. Therefore, social media marketing should be an essential component of any internet marketing plan for Des Moines businesses, which can generate tons of targeted traffic to any service or product if done properly.

Social media signals

Search engines play a vital role in the traffic equation of any internet marketing plan. Search engines love social signals because they understand that social networks and social media sites are powerful tools to get a message out there. You need to get traffic from search engines because they offer you high quality per click, but websites such as Facebook are great to get targeted traffic as well. If you get tons of social signals such as Facebook likes, Google +1’s, and Twitter shares, your search engines rankings will improve as well. You also need to remember that search engines do not like manipulation, and social signals are just another tool to get even more targeted traffic.

Getting the most out of Facebook

You can get the most out of your Facebook ads when you use Custom Audiences to advertise to people that are part of any group. For example, if you are selling a product in the internet marketing niche, then you can target groups about video marketing with the use of Custom Audiences and get the return on investment you are looking for. Custom Audiences are the next generation of tools that will be used massively to get the right message to the right people, which will help you a lot.

HootSuite

This is a dashboard that will let you manage all your Des Moines social media marketing accounts from one place. You will be handling all your social media campaigns using HootSuite to find out what is going on the social media world and your brand or product. There are tons of things you need to find out about the traffic you are getting from social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others.

Social media signals play an important role in the algorithms that search engines use to rank web pages. You can get the most out of Facebook ads when you use Custom Audiences, because you will be targeting people that are part of groups. HootSuite will help you manage your social media accounts very easily.

The primary role of managers is to make decisions. Good business managers are separated from the average ones by their ability to consistently make wise decisions.

Decisions have different scopes, perspectives, or degrees of urgency. The scope of a decision being made can apply to one particular department in a company, such as whether to add or reduce personnel, or it can have company-wide complications, such as deciding to change the compensation plan.

The perspective of a decision being made could have a short-term or long-term impact. Routine expense decisions have a short-term impact, whereas capital equipment purchases have long-term ramifications.

Decisions can also have different urgencies. Decisions that could affect whether or not you obtain new business from a large customer will likely have a different sense of urgency from the decision to have the CEO visit a small customer as a gesture of goodwill.

They can be technically based. They can have human relations components, like deciding to hire from outside or promote from within the company or should overtime work be voluntary or mandatory?

Decisions can have an operational perspective as well:

Should a job be run on machine A, B, or C, considering that machine C runs the fastest but needs a lot of maintenance?

Should management meet with a new customer at the customer’s or at management’s location, where they can give them the grand tour of the facility?

Should the organization switch from vendor A, a long-time supplier, to vendor B, who has better pricing?

Decisions can also have a long-term strategic aspect, like deciding to focus on tweaking a currently profitable product line or focusing energies on developing new technology. Should the firm try to penetrate two new international markets or focus its energies on increasing its market share domestically?

Harold Geneen coined the term unshakable facts (Economist, pg.1). Every decision he or his managers may be asked to make should be based on concrete, objective data or unshakeable facts rather than emotional, subjective feelings. This means that assumptions upon which decisions are based should be tested and researched first to confirm their validity.

This is particularly true in human relations decisions. For example, an employee is to have committed some serious offense, such as hitting another employee, practicing sexual harassment, or stealing, which are clearly dischargeable offenses based on the firm’s employee handbook.

A supervisor or manager called to the scene of one of these incidents is faced with several choices. Untrained managers may view the superficial evidence, listen to some initial witness accounts, and simply terminate the employee on the spot.

Because these are sensitive human relations issues that the entire workforce is likely to become aware of very quickly, it is crucial to diffuse the situation immediately. At the same time, it is important to consider the legalities of the human relations issues.

The best way to approach situations like this is to do the following:

Quickly diffuse the situation by suspending the employee pending a full investigation. This removes the employee from the situation, restoring calm to the workplace.

Over the next several days, conduct a calm, rational investigation.

Make the appropriate decision based on concrete, objective facts.

Another parameter of good decision-making is to make every decision from a range of options, including the option to do nothing. Every option that is being considered should be evaluated for its pros and cons., for example, before the sales department decides to open a new store in the Pacific Northwest, it should consider whether the effort and expenditures may be better spent by focusing on an existing region. Instead, should these costs be devoted to a national TV campaign that may increase sales in all regions?

The web is creating massive amounts of data every second of the day. Moore’s law states that the amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years. The social web is accelerating data. According to Cisco by 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes.

An article in The Economist observed, we are at the point of an “industrial revolution of data,” with vast amounts of digital information being created, stored and analyzed. The rise of “big data” has led in turn to an increased demand for tools to both analyze and visualize the information.

The New Competition Is Data

Smart competitors are making significant investment in their ability to collect, integrate, and analyze data from anywhere and everywhere there is an engagement with the marketplace. By constantly testing, bundling, synthesizing, and making information instantly available across the organization the company had become a different and nimbler type of business.

McKinsey Quarterly article titled: Are you ready for the era of ‘big data’? states: Radical customization, constant experimentation, and novel business models will be new hallmarks of competition as companies capture and analyze huge volumes of data. Here’s what you should know.

What happens in a world of radical transparency, with data widely available? If you could test all of your decisions, how would that change the way you compete? How would your business change if you used big data for widespread, real-time customization? How can big data augment or even replace management? Could you create a new business model based on data?

Data Complications

Big data pools represent strategic opportunities, but leaders must also consider data complications. Talent is one of them. In the United States alone the demand for people with the deep analytical skills in big data (including machine learning and advanced statistical analysis) could outstrip current projections of supply by 50 to 60 percent. By 2018, as many as 140,000 to 190,000 additional specialists may be required education and training of key data personnel.

In the 1980’s American Industry awoke to competition from Japan. Japan’s competitiveness was gained by their advanced use of data to understand how to improve the quality of products and service and thus better serve the interest of the customer. The difference between then and now is the amount of data available and limited human resources who understand how to use it.

The social web is driving the explosive growth of data like never before in the history of mankind. The data is revealing consumer preferences, wishes and desires. Those who compete in the future will understand how to not only meet those expectations but exceed them. The only ones who will know how are the one’s whose people have deep analytical skills in mining and bringing meaning to data.

The emergence of Twitter as a marketing strategy is undoubtedly gaining popularity with businesses. Twitter is a social media platform that allows the sharing of information and discovering new things within an instant, with the use of a mini blog feature that is character limited. Friends and family commonly use it to keep in touch, but recently business firms have taken to use this online platform to market their products globally. To use effectively this frontier, one has to have followers who will tweet back every time you place a tweet. However, this is normally not the case as many can hardly achieve a huge following. Therefore, the need to buy Twitter followers. Before you venture into buying followers it would be wise to look into some of the pros and cons this poses. Here is a look at some of them.

The pros: why should you buy Twitter followers?

• Gain popularity

If your marketing strategy depends highly on the number of followers you have, then buying them is good as with many followers you get to seem prestigious and impressive. The collective opinion of clients and tweeters may improve your profile and get your tweets noticed, and thus making you appear established and credible. This will increase the popularity of your website and your business especially if you are a new firm as you gain a stronger presence in the social media.

• Search engine optimization

The decision to buy Twitter followers will boost the search engine rankings of your website. Various search engines like Yahoo and Google take into account the popularity of your website in the social media networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. The large number of followers you have the higher the ranking.

• Define the target market

When you purchase Twitter followers, you are able to find those followers that are in search of your business especially those interested in your products. Buying from websites that have people looking for what you offer may bring better results to your business.

• Convert searches into results

Buying Twitter followers allows you to market your products to the target market and increase your conversion rates by having the followers tweeting back and clicking on the provided links to your website.This will not only give you the attention you desire but also increase the profits. People often tend to think that a company with many followers has quality products and with this perception, they tend to buy from such companies. Therefore, the many followers you get, the more new and legitimate followers you will attract and consequently convert into sales.

• Wide coverage

This concept has the ability to reach numerous people and convert one follower into ten. Similar to advertising through the word of mouth this will spread the word to many tweeters. The tweeting, sharing, and re- tweeting features allow news on your business or certain concepts or products to spread to a large number of people. This promotes your brand as the tweets get to people that would otherwise be beyond your reach. This may also entice new customers for you.

• Reasonably priced

Buying new Twitter followers is affordable due to the presence of many companies that are selling. The price may be as low as a few cents per follower but of great concern should be the quality of followers you are willing to purchase. Thanks to the high competition, a new firm may try this concept to see what gains it has at relatively low costs.

The cons: why should you not buy Twitter followers?

• Wrong followers

Just because you can easily amass many followers does not imply that they are real. You may end up investing in quantity rather than quality. Many such followers will not tweet back as they surely don’t exist or do not use Twitter. In addition, it is hard to create any sort of engagement with such followers especially if you purchased them from websites that are full of fraud. The probability of having a huge mix of real and fake followers is quite high.

• Defeats Twitter’s purpose

Twitter is meant to enhance social media interaction and buying followers might not meet this goal.Every social media network aims at creating conversations and connecting people. If you buy followers, you may end up with less or no interaction at all and hence resolve into un-following many thus defeating the whole aspect of social media. This therefore, beats the logic of investing into the purchase of Twitter followers.

• Low returns on investments

You will be lucky to get returns, as this venture may not give you the exact engagement and visibility you require. Buying a huge number of Twitter followers that will never tweet back or even click at the links provided is a waste of time and effort. This effort should rather be directed towards getting and engaging a few interested followers who have found you and convert them into clients.

• Divulgence of personal information

In the process of purchasing Twitter followers, the companies that do the selling require your personal data and especially your passwords in order to gain access to your account and encourage tweeters to follow you. The downside of this being that not all companies are legitimate and they may end up using your information for illegal purposes and thus jeopardizing your reputation. Fraud and any other malicious use of your personal information will immensely damage your online reputation.

• Restrictions on Twitter

Ethical Twitter restrictions require you to create a spammer free community and therefore, buying Twitter followers negates this requirement. This is not allowed and may lead to penalties. Therefore, if your aim is to be popular and make great sales, ensure you do it the right way and not gain the wrong popularity by doing things that are wrong. Still, this will make even your genuine followers lose faith in your products, as they will deem you unethical, outright dishonest, and unable to gain followers the right way.

Having studied the pros and cons of buying Twitter followers, one would say that this marketing concept makes a lot of business sense to those who depend on the wide visibility of their products to make profits. However, the naysayers tend to think it is a waste of time and money and may end up ruining your online reputation. Whether this promotes or demotes social media interaction is also in question. But with proper precautions and care taken when searching for the right companies to buy the right followers, social media interaction can be achieved and hence improve the conversation and increase conversion rates. Without further ado,to buy Twitter followers who engage actively and who have a genuine interest in your products is worth a try, but be cautious not to negate your real followers.

With the sheer number of sites online now it is more important than ever to correctly optimise your website for search engines, and particularly for the most successful engine Google. It is not as complicated as you may think to complete a full SEO overhaul of your website to make it more appealing to Google. There are many, many more technique’s that can be used to gain page rank but this is a basic guide to get you on the right track.

Content is King

One of the most important actions you can take is to make sure your website is kept up to date with original, relevant and engaging content. If you can regularly update your content and include lots of your relevant search terms it can only improve your websites credibility with Google.

Page Title

It is crucial to get your page title correct as this is the first thing that Google looks at and it is displayed within your search engine results. Your title should give a short intro to your site and have your most important keywords included, don’t just pack your title with keywords, you need to have a balance so it still makes sense to your potential visitors but you have a good helping of keywords in there to. Your title should be no more than 70 characters.

Meta Tags

The Meta Tags are found in the Head of your page and are called “Description” & “Keywords”, these are not visible to your visitors but they are used by search engines to categories your website pages, your sites description should be a full sentences or two and needs to give an explanation of your website, you want to include your top keywords but make sure it still makes sense or it may harm you SEO efforts, the description should be no longer than 160 characters.

Your Keywords are a list of the search terms you think your potential visitors are going to use to find your product or service, it is worth spending some quality time on deciding what your keywords will be as this impacts your entire SEO strategy and success. You can enter just individual words or whole phrases, your keyword research should identify what’s best for your business. You should have no more than 10 keywords or phrases, any more than this may dilute your SEO results.

Header Tags

Using Header Tags correctly will help search engines identify the key points within the text content of your page. H1 tags are usually used for page/article titles and is considered the most important. Using H2 & H3 tags is important to establish other important text content i.e. introductions. Do not just make all of your text H1 as this will just dilute your overall SEO efforts and may even decrease your website viability within Google.

Alt Attributes

Alt Attributes are use to give descriptions to images, your description is then added to your websites source code and if an image does not load your visitors will at least see a description of what should be there.

Title Attributes

You can use the Title Attributes to add extra information to text or images and it is used as an alternative or along side your Alt Attributes, if you enter the same info as your Alt Attributes you will ensure your tooltip information will be seen in all browsers.

Sitemap

Sitemaps are used to show search engines pages within your website and helps them to be crawled and index all the pages included within your sitemap.

Links

One of the best ways to increase your websites search engine position is by other websites linking to yours, the more quality links you have the more important Google thinks you are and ranks you accordingly. It is very important and most effective to have natural links from sites that have a high page rank and are relevant to the content or subject of your own website. It will harm your SEO efforts if you simply buy lots of irrelevant links from unrelated sites. The key to great links is to produce great content which people will want to link to.

URL’s

Search Friendly URL’s contain keywords that are relevant to the content on the page. For example, if the page is about Social Media your page URL might be {yourdomiannam.co.uk/socialmedia.html}

Social Media

Although Social Media isn’t usually seen as an SEO tool the use of sites like Twitter & Facebook is a great way of getting traffic to your site and with Google now showing real time results pulled from Twitter and other Social Networks it is a channel not to be ignored.

In closing – Basic SEO as described above is fairly easy to implement but it is surprising how many companies still aren’t optimising their online presence correctly. Before you undertake any of these steps make sure you have done your keyword/phrase research or all these steps will be useless and will not help to drive traffic to your website.

SEO Copywriting

A Web site’s visibility in search results relies primarily on relevant, keyword-rich HTML copy. For companies not able or willing to optimize current site copy or develop new copy, SMP can help.

Keyword Research

Delivery of a comprehensive list of terms that may be critical to a website’s search engine visibility. Keywords are the backbone of many of the recommendations we provide – both for SEO and PPC – so strategically identifying keywords that can provide a high ROI is critical.

Competitive Analysis

One of the keys to gaining in the search engines is understanding the competition. SMP exhaustively researches top competitors, examining online strategies and tactics and applying that learning to recommendations for our client’s own online strategies.

Search Engine Optimization

By delving deep into a company’s current online strategies and understanding short and long term goals, SMP is able to provide actionable Search Engine Optimization recommendations. SMP provides recommendations in several stages, tailored to the audience to which they apply. With our extensive knowledge of the latest industry tactics and strategies, and understanding that each website has different needs, SMP clients are assured to come away with an effective and comprehensive SEO plan.

SEO Reporting & Analysis

Search engine optimization is dynamic and visibility for relevant search phrases is a moving target. As such, it is necessary to continually monitor all organic search engine marketing efforts. SMP will make ongoing suggestions for improving site copy or source code to maintain or improve visibility for target search phases. SMP uses multiple data sources to report on performance, the most critical of which is a site’s Web Analytics. Understanding and making adjustments based on this real-world data can mean the difference between a website that thrives or fails.

Search Engine Marketing Public Relations (SEM PR)

SEM PR (aka Online PR or SEO PR) is a critical aspect of any successful search marketing strategy. SMP proactively works with in-house or agency PR professionals to optimize existing PR collateral for optimal search engine visibility. SEM PR campaign elements may include optimization and promotion of press releases, syndicated articles, FAQs and more

Directory Submission

Popular directories employ human editors to review site submissions, rather than search engine spiders and algorithms. SMP understands the submission process and ensures timely and accurate listings on all top tier directories (i.e. Open Directory and Yahoo!) as well as trade-related directories as part of a baseline site launch. Any directories with outdated or inaccurate listings will also be updated at launch.

Link Development

While search engines and directories generate a majority of traffic, creating inbound links is very important. Not only do qualified visitors click through from links on relevant industry sites, but search engines like Google evaluate possible results based on link popularity (links from relevant sites to your own are considered credible references). While link development is time consuming, it is a necessary aspect of site promotion that pays off big. SMP also provides training for in-house management.