Social Media – Consumers are talking about your brand in social media forums and networks, and as a business, you need a strategy to engage in these conversations. Choosing to ignore them is not an option and just jumping in without a plan is an even bigger mistake and both will result in a wasted opportunity in the social media marketingspace.

So in this series we will hightlight six practical things that you can do to make social mediawork for your business to build your brand credibility, increase online sales and enrich the communication process you have with prospects and existing customers.

Step Number One. Listen before you speak

Listening and researching your market are key first steps for any marketing effort and are very important before entering social media marketing.  So it is important to keep both ears open and monitor the daily social media activity around your brand and your industry sector.  A good social media practitioner has the right blend of marketing, business and social media expertise and is a good listener.  Listening in on blogs, forums and all forms of social media networks for opportunities to bring your brand into conversations and to add and enhance ongoing conversations are opportunities that you should not miss.

Study market sentiment - Listening to social channels gives you an  insight into the market’s reactions to your brand, products, competition and trends. It also can guide you on how to deal with and respond to negative feedback.  Managing your online reputation is crucial if you want to build your brand and market your products and services effectively.

Use social monitoring tools – It is very time consuming to monitor social networks and blogs manually.  There are now many tools available to hlep maketeers keep track and monitor online conversations related to their brand or industry keywords.

Here at WSI in Sussex, we use some paid tools but we can also recommend some free tools that include:

• Google Alerts
• Technorati
• TweetDeck
• Seesmic

Social Media Marketing is a key part of every business’ digital marketing plan and therefore it is important for all businesses to engage with their prospects and customers in the right way and by using the right platforms.  If your business wants some help or advice  with social media marketing or social media marketing tools, then contact our WSI Digital Marketing practice here in Sussex today.  What social media marketing plans have you thought about for your business, we would love to hear from you.

Technorati Tags: social media, social media marketing

Video Marketing

Video marketing has become one of the best promotional tools on the web. Well-executed videos can grab attention faster than any other advertising medium as videos continue to draw internet users in droves. Research byeMarketer shows 66.7 percent of the 147.5 million U.S. internet users watch video online monthly. By 2014, eMarketer estimates that number will rise to 77 percent of internet users (193.1 million people).  You can read the full video marketing story here.

So if you want to power your digital marketing plans, then video marketing is right for you and we can help so give us a call or contact us via our digital marketing contactpage.

Technorati Tags: marketing with video, Video Marketing, video shorts

Video Marketing is a very poweful form of digital marketing. I have recently written a video marketing post which covered some of the best ways of integrating video marketing into your business digital marketing plan.  There are a huge number of sites where you can upload and share your videos, from YouTube to Facebook and many other sites in between and the decision can be overwhelming or very confusing.   So how do you decide which video site is best for you?  My previous video marketing blog outlined some of the main choices that are out there.  But first it is important to understand what you are trying to accomplish.

What Are You Trying to Achieve

There are a number of things to think about when deciding where you want to upload your videos on the web.  Before you even begin to think about creating an account at an online video site you need to be clear about your intentions:

• Do you intend to upload home videos to share with your friends and family? 
• Will you be uploading personal video blogs that you want to reach as many people as possible? 
• Do you want to share your videos with a few close friends or broadcast them to millions? 
• Do you want to make money off of your videos? 

All of these questions are important to consider.  If you want your videos to go viral by getting as many views as possible, then you don’t  necessarily need to sign up for the same video site as someone who just wants to share their home videos with a few friends. 

If your main objective in uploading videos to the Internet is to get as many views as possible then you should go with YouTube. YouTube is the largest and most well known video sharing site and offers up the most potential for getting a lot of views. You may also want to consider DailyMotion and Viddlerare because they are also good places to upload your videos if you are looking to go viral.

If you are interested in uploading home videos to share them with your friends and family then you will want to choose a site with a simple interface and high video quality.  Vimeo, Viddler and Veoh are popular sites for home videos.  Facebook is also a good place you can also upload your video there and share it will all of your Facebook friends and family privately.

Most people upload videos to the web to share them with their friends and family or to promote themselves and get feedback.  However, there are also a lot of people who upload video because they want to make money.  If you are looking to make money on your video content then there are a few video sites that you should look into.  Revver, blip.tv and Brightcove all offer revenue share programs, giving creators the opportunity to monetize on their web video content.

Animators, filmmakers, documentarians, music video producers and other creative types love Vimeo.  Vimeo is great for creatives because it serves as a creative community where you can get comment and feedback.  Whilst you may not get as many views on Vimeo as you would on a site like YouTube, you will find a whole group of like minded users who are more than happy to give you feedback and constructive criticism on your work.

Many bloggers host their videos on an online video site in order to embed them within their blog posts.  If you plan to embed videos on your blog then the most important thing to keep in mind is the style of the player.  You want to choose a video site with a player that does not clash with the design of your site.  Vimeo and Viddler are popular among bloggers, as their players offer simplicity and they also have very good picture quality.

If you tend to produce a lot of video content about one specific topic or niche then you may consider uploading your videos to a niche video site.  For instance, if you like shooting news-related content then you should consider uploading your videos to CNN’s iReport.  If you are a vlogger who likes to stream live then Justin.tvor Ustream are good choices for you.  If there is not a niche video site for the niche you are focused on, just be sure to file your videos under a relevant category and relevant tags within the site you use. Once you have narrowed down your selection of video sites based on your needs there are a few things that you have to think about on the technical side.  Following are some of the most important technical aspects to look into.

It is important to keep in mind that you don’t have to restrict yourself to one video site.  You can increase your exposure by uploading videos to multiple sites.  Of course, it can be more difficult keeping track of views, comments and messages on multiple accounts but there are tools that can help you out.  TubeMogul, for instance, is a great tool that allows you to upload and distribute your video to multiple sites at one time, track analytics and reach wide numbers of viewers.

Here at WSI in Sussex, we have a great video marketing service and can help you produce the video and select the best video sites for your marketing videos.  We can also syndicate your video to several sites so that you get the maximum exposure for your marketing video. 

Technorati Tags: marketing with video, Video Marketing, video marketing sussex, video shorts

Video Marketing is a major growth area in the area of online marketing. Based on some recent analysis and research, performed by the Pew Research Center, 57% of people in America have downloaded online video and 19% download video daily. As PCs are gradually replacing televisions for a lot of consumers and mobile technology continues to develop, it can be expected that the use of video for many business and personal activities will continue to grow. The same study also discovered that over half of the users who are enjoying video were sharing the video clips with a number of people, showcasing the viral or person to person advertising feature associated with this method.
Video and audio are powerful forms of content and they are rapidly developing as the advertising tool of choice for most companies both big and small. They offer a lot of advantages over regular print content, including:

• Showcase your businesses qualities – online shoppers really want authenticity and transparency and they need to know who you are and what your organisation stands for and is all about. Video is an excellent approach to promote your qualities.
• Get almost automatic results – video and audio will often be seen immediately while regular print articles and other content may often sit in an email inbox for weeks.
• Convey a better story – video and audio provide your business a unique chance to show rather than just tell your  prospects and clients about your products and services. In advertising and marketing  the old saying, “Show, don’t tell” is still a very powerful message.
• Capture your audiences’  focus in a whole brand new way. If your target market has grown accustomed to print, then video and audio can really engage them once again and encourage action.
• Google has been progressively displaying more videos in the search results.
• Above all making a video is fun, is quite affordable and posting it is free.
• Get other people to promote your products and services for you. Just about all video sharing services like YouTube, include several tools to help people spread the word. In this way other people literally market your videos for you.

As yet there is reduced amount of competition. The majority of companies continue to advertise their business websites by making use of articles or blog posts. However, only a small percentage of them take advantage of videos.  This means that the level of competition is a lot less.

As outlined by a Marketing Sherpa analysis about Video Marketing published in January 2009, 57% of internet marketers who have made use of video for advertising reasons are usually happy with the results. You should be doing it for your business!

Technorati Tags: marketing with video, Video Marketing, video shorts

Video Marketing is a major growth area in the area of online marketing. Based on some recent analysis and research, performed by the Pew Research Center, 57% of people in America have downloaded online video and 19% download video daily. As PCs are gradually replacing televisions for a lot of consumers and mobile technology continues to develop, it can be expected that the use of video for many business and personal activities will continue to grow. The same study also discovered that over half of the users who are enjoying video were sharing the video clips with a number of people, showcasing the viral or person to person advertising feature associated with this method.

Video and audio are powerful forms of content and they are rapidly developing as the advertising tool of choice for most companies both big and small. They offer a lot of advantages over regular print content, including:

• Showcase your businesses qualities – online shoppers really want authenticity and transparency and they need to know who you are and what your organisation stands for and is all about. Video is an excellent approach to promote your qualities.
• Get almost automatic results – video and audio will often be seen immediately while regular print articles and other content may often sit in an email inbox for weeks.
• Convey a better story – video and audio provide your business a unique chance to show rather than just tell your  prospects and clients about your products and services. In advertising and marketing  the old saying, “Show, don’t tell” is still a very powerful message.
• Capture your audiences’  focus in a whole brand new way. If your target market has grown accustomed to print, then video and audio can really engage them once again and encourage action.
• Google has been progressively displaying more videos in the search results.
• Above all making a video is fun, is quite affordable and posting it is free.
• Get other people to promote your products and services for you. Just about all video sharing services like YouTube, include several tools to help people spread the word. In this way other people literally market your videos for you.

As yet there is reduced amount of competition. The majority of companies continue to advertise their business websites by making use of articles or blog posts. However, only a small percentage of them take advantage of videos.  This means that the level of competition is a lot less.

As outlined by a Marketing Sherpa analysis about Video Marketing published in January 2009, 57% of internet marketers who have made use of video for advertising reasons are usually happy with the results. You should be doing it for your business.

Technorati Tags: Marketing Sherpa, online marketing, Video Marketing

Digital Marketing for Sport – 3 Reasons Why Sports Marketers Need Social Media

Sponsoring an athlete, sports team or an event is not just about signing a cheque. It’s more than just getting your name on the side of a car or a sign in the stadium. For those of you that know me you know that Sport is my passion and I’m also involved in business consultancy and digital marketing so here is my take on Sports Marketing. 

Basically, if you want your sponsorship pounds to be an effective marketing tool, you need to double your total sponsorship just to promote the fact that you have a sponsorship deal. If you’re sponsoring a rugby team, you need to tell your customers about it, and get them to cheer for “your” team. If you’re sponsoring a football team, you need to get your best customers into the luxury suite to see and hear the game. Even if you’re sponsoring a small local village football team, you need to find a way to bring the parents into your store or restaurant after the game.

The Same Old Problem – You Can’t Effectively Measure Traditional Marketing

Sports marketing is no longer just about soliciting cheques from big companies – you have to be able to demonstrate the ROI of a sponsorship.  Measurement and analytics for  off-line marketing is nearly impossible.  It is almost impossible to know which TV commercials increased sales, and which ones lost money. You don’t know which billboards brought visitors to your website. And you certainly don’t know which logo placement or interview plug was responsible for the increase in sales.
But social media can do all of that, and more. Here are three things social media can do for sports marketers:

1. Social Media Can Prove ROI in Sports Marketing

The great thing about social media is that it’s easy to demonstrate the ROI. Thanks to simple tools like Google Analytics and bit.ly, it’s possible to come up with a basic system to see how many people found your website, requested additional information, or bought something.
You can measure a campaign’s success and figure out which variables, messages, and even time of day brought the best results. See if you get spikes in traffic before, during, or after an event. And whether the spikes are taking place in the city, or if they’re spread out. You can even set up different URLs and landing pages, and do A/B testing to see which variables brought the best results.
With social media, you can pay attention to who’s talking about your brand, and interact with the ones who are the most vocal, whether positive or negative. You just can’t do that with a billboard or a TV spot.

2. Social Media Can Grow a Sports Marketing Audience

There are more social media tools than you can shake a stick at. Suffice it to say, there are plenty of ways to connect with your customers online.  Use tools like Twitterment, NearbyTweets, and even Twitter’s own search function to find people who are interested in your team. Use Twitterfall or TweetDeck’s search feature to watch for discussions about your team or the event.
Connect with those people, and discuss the team, the players/drivers/crew, and the event itself. Don’t sell them anything or talk about your company. if you have to, hold a special contest or make a special offer. “If our team finishes in a certain place or higher, the first 500 people to tweet us gets a coupon for a free widget.” But other than that, talk about the thing that interests the fans (hint: it’s not you).

3. Social Media Can Deepen Relationships With Fans and Customers

Enhance your customers’ experience on race day by live blogging, tweeting, and video streaming from the stands, the sponsor’s tent, or even Victory Lane.

• Get some behind-the-scenes looks (assuming you get permission from the team) at what it looks like in a garage or locker room.
• Hold a special Twitter chat with a driver or crew member.
• Have a player give a special video greeting or tour for fans.
• Ask different team members to blog about their experiences over the season, complete with photos and videos.

Social media lets fans see the things they might be missing, but help them feel like they’re part of the experience. By doing this, you help them feel more like a part of the team. They’re insiders, with special knowledge about the team, the athletes, and the event. By feeling like they’re connected, they’ll become more of a fan, not only of the team, but of the organization or brand that helped them get there.

If you want any advice on digital marketing or social media plans the contact us on our business webpages

Technorati Tags: digital marketing, social media

Significance of Sitemaps

Today there are many SEO techniques that help you to optimize your site, but one trick whose importance is undervalued at times is a Sitemap. A Sitemap is really a page on your site that indicates the complete structure of your site including various sections, links between them, and so on. In short it gives a detailed listing of your web site layout. Sitemaps have become helpful because they create site navigation easy for the visitors as well as help search engines index the site.

Sitemaps usually fall into two categories. The first is a HTML version which is for human site visitors so helping them navigate through the whole site and find the information they are looking for. The other Sitemap is an XML version that is meant for the search engine to know about all the pages on the site including all the URLs that may go unnoticed by the search engine spidering the website.

Sitemap benefits

There are many great things about using sitemaps that are detailed below:

Easy Navigation

A sitemap helps a visitor know where to locate particular information he is searching for on the site. It acts as a guide to enable easy navigation through the site without wasting time to find information.

Search Engine Indexing

Sitemaps help search engines learn about any updates which you make on your website. It is not guaranteed that the search engine bot will instantly index the updated webpages, however, the modifications will certainly be indexed considerably faster when compared with when there isn’t any sitemap.

New Site

For those who have a brand new internet site with very few links in it, sitemaps can be beneficial. The reason being the search engine spider crawls through documents by following links from one page to another and if your site does not contain proper links, it might be challenging for the bots to index them.

Broken Links

For those who have a web site which contains lots of content webpages that are improperly linked to one another or have broken links then using sitemaps will help search engine bots to index your pages better.

Dynamic Content on Site

Sitemaps are also very helpful if you have a site where your content is updated or changed frequently. The search engines can be immediately informed of this change through your sitemap. However, this will not assure you that your changed pages will be indexed right away.

Sitemap Process

To create a Sitemap for your website there are some simple steps you need to follow. First, a Sitemap needs to be generated and then it should be uploaded to the website and last but not least Google ought to be advised about it.

Sitemap Generation

A sitemap might be generated in two ways. The first is by making use of a web based tool that may help you generate the sitemap along with the other is by downloading it and setting up a sitemap generator. The first alternative is less of a challenge compared to the second one as there are numerous online sitemap generation methods available free of cost that make your work simpler. The other option of downloading and setting up a sitemap generator is a little difficult but lets you obtain a better control of the end result.

Uploading and Submitting Your Sitemap

As soon as your sitemap is created, it has to be uploaded to your website and Google should be advised about it. So that you can notify Google you should add your internet site to your Google Sitemap account. However, in case you do not have already a Google Sitemap account, this is the time that you should produce one. Furthermore, it is important to know that adding a sitemap to your account needs a confirmation indicating you are the lawful owner of the web site.

Additionally it is important to know that Google does not guarantee that all the URLs in your sitemap will be spidered and indexed. For instance, if there are any image URLs in your sitemap, these will not be crawled and indexed. However, your sitemap can help the search engine to know more about your site layout which will help it to crawl your site better and faster when compared to not having a sitemap. Webmasters usually benefit from submitting sitemaps and will not be penalized for it.

Technorati Tags: Sitemap

A Financial Management firm can create a strong web presence by designing and developing a business website on the internet.  However, this step alone is not a digital marketing plan. Just putting up a Financial Management firm website on the internet is similar to establishing a physical business like a shop or an office, and then just sitting back and waiting for the customers to flow in. More than likely, it will not happen and your website will resemble a billboard in the desert.

Financial Management firms must understand that they need to spread the word about their firm, talk to people, inform, engage with potential clients and communicate their services using the internet.

The focus of web searchers looking for accountants has changed, and instead of turning to the yellow pages, people prefer to search the net in order to find an Financial Management firm.  To search for a Financial Management firm in Tunbridge Wells

·         Visitor 1 may type “Tunbridge Wells Financial Managers”

·         Visitor 2 might search for “Financial Management firms Tunbridge Wells”.

·         Visitor 3 might search for “IFA Tunbridge Wells”

Different people search in different ways and it is important to make sure that your Financial Management firm website captures this valuable traffic.

What should Financial Management firms, large and small, do to be found on the web?

Financial Management firms need to invest in a digital marketing strategy that will specialise in Financial Management firm search engine optimisation, Financial Management firm marketing and website design. A professional digital media marketing consultant will have the relevant business expertise and will know how to handle this. Other important factors are:

·         Digital media marketing starts with your Financial Management firm website design. The website must be structured with elements of search engine optimisation, where the meta tags are properly written and executed. The website is designed with SEO in mind. The starting point is keyword research and when this is done properly the right keywords are embedded in the content.  Images and graphics are optimised to make the Financial Management firm’s website search engine friendly.

·         While the above will greatly help in organic search engine rankings, the digital marketing strategy may need some quick traffic through a Pay Per Click campaign. Organic search engine optimisation will take a few months to get going until the web site attains authority in the search engine rankings. During this time, the sponsored listing or paid advertisements will help to project the Financial Management firm and traffic will start to flow to the website.

·         In parallel, the digital marketing strategy will also lead you through other digital media marketing mediums such as announcing your Financial Management firm website presence through press releases and news. Syndication will help that news to reach as many readers as possible

·         While this will draw enough website traffic to start getting web visitors and leads, the digital media marketing strategy will also start building a social network campaign through Video, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to draw the Financial Management firm close to social communities on the internet.

·         The strategy will deploy legal blogging, article writing and submissions.  Through blogs and articles, it is possible to create an air of trust by writing about the Financial Management firm, and educate readers about Financial Management. This will project the Financial Management firm as an authority on the subject and people will tend to trust the firm with their business.

·         We have heard the phrase “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” and this is still very applicable today and even more so in a period of recession.  In this context, the digital marketing plan will use web analytics to collect data from the website to determine which aspects of the site are working towards the defined business objectives for the website. 

Web analytics is a continuous improvement process and a key part of an effective digital marketing plan. It is not enough just to produce reports each month, you need to analyse these reports so you can ensure that the website is always responding to the needs of its visitors. Once you have gathered your data, analysed the results, proposed changes and implemented these changes you repeat the process all over again.

Financial Management firms and who think that digital marketing for their firm is a thing they can do without are severely cutting themselves short. Consider these facts from January 2010:

·         Over 60,500 searches being conducted in the UK for the term “Financial Advisor”

·         Over 33,100 searches for the term “Financial Advisors”

·         40,500 searches conducted for the words “Financial Advisers”

·         18, 500 searches for the term ”Independent Financial Advisors”

·         100s of thousands of more searches for related terms

The question is: Can Financial Management firms and keep themselves away from a focussed digital marketing strategy? 

Learn more about a specialised digital media marketing strategy for your Financial Management firm at http://www.wsionlinebiz.co.uk or give us a call at 01580 819529.

Technorati Tags: digital marketing, internet marketing

Paid search marketing uses an advertising model often referred to as direct response because it allows advertisers to purchase premium placed ads of their choice on search engine result pages, advertising networks and content sites such as blogs and news sites.  This advertising model is often referred to as Pay Per Click (PPC) and for the right business it can be a key element of their Digital Internet Marketing toolkit.

How Does PPC Advertising Work?

Paid search programs allow site owners to “bid” on the terms they wish to appear for. You agree to pay a certain amount each time someone clicks on your listing. Websites that utilise PPC ads will display an advertisement when a keyword query matches an advertiser’s keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to or above organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a Web developer chooses on a content site.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Lets Your Company

• Reach prospects when they are actively looking for information or products and services related to their business
• Run cost effective advertising campaigns, as this type of advertising is less expensive than any other type of traditional advertising and lets business owners have control over their budget.
• Have flexibility and control. You can edit your campaigns and ads at any time (24 hours a day, 7 days a week).

Ads start running for the first time almost immediately after you activate your account with your credit card or direct debit information. (Advertisers in certain countries can pay by bank transfer. In this case, ads run when the first payment is received.)

Industries That PPC Works Well In:

PPC works well in those services that people need immediately and used to go to the Yellow Pages to look for.  If you are keen to drive traffic to your business website then PPC should be one of the tools you should seriously look into.

Paid Search Marketing Platforms

There are many PPC providers but the three largest network operators are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter and all three operate under a bid-based model.  The Cost per click (CPC) varies depending on the search engine and the level of competition for a particular keyword.

Contact Anthony Burke here to discuss any aspect of digital internet marketing.  He has many years of executive experience in business development, marketing and the Internet with large companies – more recently Hewitt Associates, Xchanging, Axa Insurance and several key London Market Insurers. Anthony now runs his own business which is associated with WSI to provide companies with affordable digital internet marketing solutions to enable profitable growth and increase marketing ROI.  He is also a member of the British Computer Society, the Chartered Institute for IT, and a registered Prince2 Practitioner.

Technorati Tags: digital marketing, internet marketing, Pay Per Click

The use of the internet and business websites for a variety of business and leisure activities is now very widespread amongst first world economies and this includes 20% of the population who are elderly or have some form of disability. 

Some people with disabilities find using the internet difficult and we also know that many web sites do not accommodate people with visual or other disabilities. It is important that all business website owners strive to make their websites as accessible as possible.  If not, you may  be in breach of the UK Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). Similar legislation exists in other countries including the US, Canada and Australia.

Web accessibility should be part of your Digital Internet Marketing plan and is about making your website accessible to all Internet users (both disabled and non-disabled), regardless of what browsing technology they’re using. In addition to complying with the law, an accessible website can reap huge benefits for business by increasing the traffic to the site and enhancing the site’s reputation.

An accessible website ensures that all visitors have the same user experience whether they use assistive technology or not. As a minimum, websites should meet the level 1 (and in part level 2) of the W3C’s (Web Accessibility Initiative) standards and guidelines for creating accessible websites.

There are two very good reasons why businesses should start taking these issues seriously, simply put:

• An accessible website will make you more money
• An accessible website will save you money

For advice on web accessibility issues, contact Anthony Burke here to discuss this issue or any aspect of digital internet marketing.  Anthony runs his own business which is associated with WSI to provide companies with affordable digital internet marketing solutions to enable profitable growth and increase marketing ROI.  He is also a member of the British Computer Society, the Chartered Institute for IT, and a registered Prince2 Practitioner.

Technorati Tags: accessible websites, internet marketing, web accessibility