by Karl Hudson | May 11, 2013 | Marketing
Any serious business entrepreneurs that wish to expand their operations by marketing their products and services through the internet have to formulate a quality online marketing strategy. The formulation process can be extremely cumbersome, and time consuming especially if one is not equipped with information on how to do it right.
Here are some of the considerations that need to be factored in during the formulation process.
The target audience
Understanding your target audience will help you develop a marketing strategy that is effective in increasing your sales. For example, if your products are hugely popular among the youth, the most recommendable online platform that you can use to market the product is social media.
Competition
Competition is one of the market forces that are inevitable in any non-monopoly market. In order to compete effectively with other players in the same niche, one has to come up with a marketing strategy that is unique and more competitive. You may need to look at the marketing strategy being used by your competitors before choosing a particular strategy.
Sustainability
This is by far one of the key aspects that you have to consider so as to avoid inconveniences. A marketing strategy is an investment just like any other hence there is the need to develop certain financial plans so as to avoid financial problems later. It is wise to formulate a budget that covers your estimated costs so as to avoid over expenditure. A financial analyst can help you formulate an accurate budget that will cushion your business from unexpected costs.
One of the major benefits of online marketing is that it popularises businesses to the ever growing online community. However, in order to achieve the expected results, one has to deploy various reputation management tactics so as to ensure that the business image is not compromised.
Online marketing is a sure way of elevating your business to the next level of success.
by Karl Hudson | Apr 29, 2013 | Marketing
Web development can consist of the work entailed in creating a simple page of plain text, or developing the most complex web-based applications, for a web site intended for the internet or an intranet. The internet is plainly the world wide web. An intranet is a private network, usually used locally within an individual business or industry. Web development, as it is commonly referred to by web professionals, includes writing markup and coding websites, as opposed to the page and layout design aspects of creating a web site.
Web development has evolved into a booming industry on its own since the world wide web has become commercialized. This substantial growth is especially fueled by business operations that want to sell their products and services online. Yet, another contributing factor to the continued growth of the web development industry has been the creation of easy to use software for the purpose of web development. This software makes web development projects possible for virtually any individual who wants to put forth the initiative and program a web site. In addition to many easily understood tutorials available on the internet to learn LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql and PHP) for web site programming, free of charge, the more popular and commonly used software for individuals to use are:
* Adobe Dreamweaver
* WebDev
* Microsoft Expression Studio
The tools and technology for the creation of remarkably dynamic and interactive web sites that are accessible on the internet or on an intranet continues in a momentum toward advancement. Now, web developers can create applications and deliver them as web services that used to only be possible on desk based computers. These applications can be the result of the combined efforts of a large number of people, in such as the larger business organizations, or the product of a single webmaster. It involves client and server side coding and a knowledge of database technology.
Basic Web Development
Web developers usually have the following interdisciplinary knowledge and skills:
* Graphic/Web Design
* Information Architecture/Copywriting
Graphic and Web design roles include the design and layout of the web page, while information architecture and copywriting refers to the actual information design with the consideration of be usable and accessible on the web, and search engine optimized.
Advanced Web Development
There are nearly a dozen advanced interdisciplinary skills and knowledge that more professional web developers should possess in addition to the basic interdisciplinaries, though these are not entirely necessary for an individual who is interested in creating a simple web application. These areas of expertise include:
* Audio processing and encoding
* Video processing and encoding
* Animation processing and encoding
* Graphic User Interface Design
* Flash Capabilities
* Web Site Security Analysis and Testing
* Web Site Code Optimization
* Project Management and other aspects of Information Technology Development
Web Developers and Security
Security is an important consideration for a web developer, whether it is the web development of a simple, single site application by a webmaster or a complex, dynamic and interactive site developed for the purpose of e-commerce. Ever-increasing are the numbers of unscrupulous parties whose internet objectives are malicious attacks of web sites to steal confidential and protected information such as passwords, email addresses and credit card numbers. Web developers should test their applications for security measures before making the sites publicly available. For example, contact and other forms in an application should include a captcha field, which cannot be filled in by a computer, to help prevent the application from be exploited.
Read more of this at https://old.getmediawise.com/
by Karl Hudson | Apr 27, 2013 | Marketing
A recent report indicates that social media accounts for nearly one in every five minute spent on the internet, and it has a reach of more than 1.2 billion users. That’s almost about 82% of the world population! Needless to say, Facebook rules the roost with nearly 55 percent of the world population spending about 3 in every 4 minutes on this network. But what do these statistics mean to an average marketer? Simple! It means opportunities. If you are a marketer yourself, I’m sure you’d agree that we put our money where the trend is. Thus, is born the trend of social media and online marketing.
But what is social media marketing:
This involves the use of social media channels to persuade consumers to prefer a product or service over the other. People discuss, like, and even share information about your product or service. Within the social media circle, you aren’t really bothered about reaching the front page of the site. You are more concerned about establishing your influence, reputation and brand with potential customers, readers and supporters.
Understanding the importance of the LIKE button:
As earlier said, Facebook has reached gargantuan proportions. A few years ago ‘Like’ may have been attributed to an emotion, but now thanks to Facebook, it is a verb, an action word. Although introduced in 2009, this button has become the most visible aspect of every web page. If you like a product or service, simply click on the like button of the web page and the friends in your list know about it. If they like it, their friends get to know about it. The saga can be never ending.
What are the benefits of using social media for marketing?
- Branding: There isn’t a better way to brand your product in the online world than social media. A million likes or tweets may not directly fetch revenue, but they certainly brand you well.
- Lead Generation: A leading cosmetic brand successfully penetrated into the Indian market through the use of social media. This brand was considered to be a high range brand, and thus wasn’t embraced among the rural population. The social media campaign needed people to register and get a free sample of the cosmetic. Gradually the number of people who opted for the free samples turned into steady customers, once they realized the worth of the product.
- Announcing products and services: Rather than spending thousands of dollars on advertising, social media provides a platform to announce about the new product or service.
Know more about our services. https://old.getmediawise.com/
by Karl Hudson | Apr 25, 2013 | Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of helping a web page rank effectively in Google or other search engines. There are a few different types of search engine optimisation, natural, unnatural, pay per click. These are also known as organic and PPC. The benefits of organic SEO by far outweigh the benefits of PPC, however, PPC comes into its own when you are looking to discover if a keyword is profitable or not before investing a lot of time and money into organic SEO, based around a keyword that does not work.
Many people use PPC as a way of discovering and testing keywords. This is one area we have recently delved into and have seen great success and we can’t recommend it enough to those who are looking to develop their online business. Many internet marketing strategies include an active PPC campaign. This could be solely to just test the market or it could be the type of campaign that the company uses to succeed online or sell a product.
The health niche is a highly sought after niche, especially where PPC is concerned. Many health products use PPC to test to see whether or not their products sell and from there, look to promote it based on the results.
Organic SEO is where you begin to market and build your website to multiple platforms as well as social media platforms and building references online to your website, which starts to make the search engines believe that your website is an authority site within its niche. After your website is seen as an authority website, you will build to rank easily for a variety of different keywords. Many SEO strategies tend to focus on developing a mini site as opposed to developing an authority site.
There are two types of areas within organic SEO one of which is white hat and other is black hat:
- White Hat includes the use of recommended good design, on page optimisation and social media integration.
- Black Hat is an SEO technique which improves rankings in a way that is disapproved by search engine giants such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. One of the simple techniques the black hat would use in the past was to hide keywords within the text and make them invisible to the human eye but visible to the robots’.
Nowadays, SEO plays a big part in most corporations and businesses. It is vital that your website is being marketed, as your competitors could be given the exact same but getting a head start. So what are you waiting for? Get started today!
by Karl Hudson | Mar 31, 2013 | Pay Per Click Marketing
Using the internet to advertise products and services is not only extremely effective, it is also very competitive. When it comes to getting traffic (viewers/potential customers) to a website there are many options. Two of the most popular are pay-per-click and search-engine-optimization (SEO).
Getting your website to the top of the rankings in the search engines is the name of the game and pay-per-click and SEO are targeted for doing just that. There is one big difference between the two methods; time. With pay-per-click you can have a campaign up and in the sponsored listings in minutes; SEO on the other hand can take several weeks or months to get your website ranked.
Pay-per-click is quite simply one of the easiest and cheapest ways to advertise on the internet today, as long as you do your research. Most search engines offer some form of pay-per-click advertising program. While they may differ in the user interface and how ads are ranked they all have one thing in common. Every time a web surfer clicks an the ad that advertiser has to pay a fee.
There are pros and con’s when it comes to a pay-per-click marketing campaign. If you monitor your campaigns closely and continually learn from you mistakes it can be a very effective money maker. One of its biggest pros is you don’t have to fine tune your web pages to adjust your position in the search engines. It is all based on how much you are bidding and how well your page converts.
One of the biggest pros is how quickly and easily you can get an ad up and diverting traffic to your web site. Once you set up your ad, your bids and the link to your website you are up and running. There is nothing too technical about it; it just comes down to learning about your market and giving them what they want.
The con of a pay-per-click business is that you are essentially engaging in a bidding war. The higher bidder gets the higher position in the search results. If you are outbid your position will drop. To regain your position you will have to raise your bid which can result in less profit. The more popular the keywords you’re bidding on the higher the bids are going to be.
All it takes is some simple math to figure out if your pay-per-click campaign is cost effective. What you need to figure out is what the cost per click of each visitor to your site is and how much profit per click you are or will be expecting to make is. Most marketers base this on 100 clicks and a 1% conversion rate. If your product costs $25 then you need to figure what the break even point is for your highest bid. For every 100 clicks you get one sale worth $25. That breaks down to a profit per click of 25 cents to break even. But this is a business and the idea is to make a profit. Any bid under 25 cents will be profitable and the lower you can bid and keep a good position the bigger the return on investment (ROI).
Learning everything you can about keyword research and how they relate to the market you are targeting is the key to pay-per-click success. There is no limit to the amount of keywords you can use and the more targeted means a bigger ROI.
Your ad copy is the most crucial part of your pay-per-click marketing. Your description of what product you are offering needs to be as specific as possible to attract visitors who are looking to buy what you are offering. Keep it in mind that pay-per-click ads are short and to the point. The words you use must be specific, to the point and enticing to potential buyers.
Once you have a pay-per-click campaign up and running it is vitally important that you monitor your bids and ad placement. Trying to get a top ranking is not always necessary, but you do want to be in the middle of the first page. By keeping close track of your bids you can keep the battle going for the prime positions and create the greatest return on investment. The whole purpose of pay-per-click marketing is to make money, not win the bidding war. In many ways you would rather win the battle than the War with PPC advertising.
To win at pay-per-click marketing you must not only monitor your campaigns closely but you must also analyze and research visitor behavior and the markets you are engaged in. You must take all these considerations into account to insure that your pay-per-click campaigns are a success.
