The Power of Availability
The saying goes, “If you aren’t online in 2010 you don’t exist.”
Everyday consumers search the web for information on companies and a variety of products. Ranging from trying to find a cheap flight to figuring out where the closest flower shop is. Consumers are relying on the web to be the one place where they can find whatever they want – whenever they want. If a consumer searches your organization’s name, products, brand or services and your company doesn’t show up; to that consumer – you don’t exist.
There are millions upon millions of people who use Social Networking sites on a daily basis. Recently, Social Networking has surpassed pornography as being the most popular activity on the web. Ranging from Facebook to Twitter – your organization cannot afford to miss such an opportunity to be relevant.
The Power of Branding
Like an onion the web has many, many different layers. Your branding strategy should be similar. You need to take advantage of the various layers the web has to offer your company in strengthening its brand. While a consistent brand is most important – A continuous branding strategy is equally essential.
The web allows you to utilize not only your website for branding, but now has many other platforms that can help strengthen your brand. With a solid branding strategy you can utilize twitter, blogging, Facebook, tumblr and many other tools to make your brand not only relevant but also powerful.
The Power of Customer Feedback
A lot of companies are afraid to hear what customers are saying about them, but that’s not how you should do business. This is where you should set yourself apart from those companies and take the time to show your customers that you care.
Within seconds of searching social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook you can track what people are saying about your company in real-time. This is an opportunity for companies who are looking for ways to improve their customer service or even fix some problems that you hadn’t noticed before.
Picture this, someone is on Twitter and they tweet how bad they’re craving pizza. Then a few minutes later Pizza Hut sends them a message saying:
“Hey, I saw your tweet about how you were craving pizza! Message me your e-mail and I’ll send you a 25% off coupon”
Not only would this person be blown away by the fact that Pizza Hut went above and beyond to serve them. They will most definitely pass this story along to their friends, followers and colleagues to let them know about this service.
The Power of Traffic
Recently Facebook surpassed Google’s incredible ability to drive traffic to key websites. This shows us the power of Social Networking and the influence it has over web traffic. You can no longer only rely on Search Engine Optimization for traffic – And you definitely can’t put all of your eggs in the Adwords basket. Instead you must work with these methods and Social Media to drive traffic to your website.
The Power of Returns
A lot of people question whether or not you can find a legitimate return on investment from all of this social media stuff. Well, to put it simply; you can. Depending on the industry you are in, you can track the influence the web has had on your business in a variety of ways.
Using web promotions and coupons you can easily track what sales came directly from your online efforts. If originally your sales were increasing monthly by 5% and then suddenly you started to implement this strategy and sales shot up by 50% – It’s pretty obvious where the jump came from.
Promotions are not the only way to track how effective your social media efforts are. Using innovative software, you can track how often people are mentioning you compared to the days you spent without a solid online presence. Or the increase in web traffic you generate after beginning to use a social media platform.
Ross
Ross Simonds
Ross Simmonds, is the Co-Founder of Altego Marketing Solutions an Interactive Marketing & Experience Design firm that helps small/medium sized businesses implement profitable marketing strategies using the web and branding
If you’re interested in discussing how you can improve your companies online presence contact PHI or Ross at Ross@ReachDontPreach.com.
In the last few months I have been doing intense market research on real estate marketing and trends. Not that it should come as a surprise to anyone but, things are changing. Things are changing fast! Just look at the USA market and you will quickly see where we are headed – when times are tough the strong, the quick to adapt and the most innovative succeed.
In a recent conversation with a colleague of mine who owns a small business, he lamented the catch 22 situation of wanting to increase sales and his company’s market share while keeping overhead under control. Bottom line for him was adding a salesperson to pound the streets, or a telesales rep to “dial for dollars”, seemed the safest route to go. The problem is, he noted, there just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day for him to help those salespeople develop a thoughtful sales strategy, let alone craft a comprehensive marketing strategy to guide the company beyond the next Quarter. Keeping customers satisfied, employees paid and servicing the company’s debt were his priorities. For owners of small businesses and start-ups in particular, this is a very common scenario.
the small issues I’ve had and the work arounds (using posts from other Dell users and not from Dell’s site) and expected to hear how they have some solution for me…To my dismay, the call quickly moved to a sales pitch for the extended warranty! I emphatically told them I was not interested. We went back and forth and I explained how I didn’t need the $400 extended warranty at which point she went into full script mode for 3 minutes without letting me get a word in. I put the phone on hands free and went back to what I was doing before she called. Eventually she hung up. I twitted the experience expecting to get a response like I did from Hertz. Hertz is a car rental company, Dell is a technology company….surely Dell would be as or more advanced than Hertz! Nope. Nothing. Now what was suppose to increase Dells revenue has only succeeded in further frustrating a customer. FYI, a few days ago they called again…I explained they had already called me and I wasn’t interested….they hung up. Wow, not smart, but it appears that’s The Dell “standard operating procedure”!
