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Should You Drop Email Marketing for Social Media?

July 30, 2010 by Jeune Ortiz

With the rise of social media, many businesses are opting out of email marketing and trying to jump on the social bandwagon. It sounds like it would make sense right? Everyone is on some sort of social media platform, including your customers and potential customers. Social media let’s you keep in touch in small bits, every day, multiple times a day, whereas email marketing is a slower, less frequent mode of communication.

So Should You Drop Email in Favor of Social Media Marketing?

The short answer is no. However dull email marketing may look in the shadow of all that shiny social media, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, most of the email marketing services are include social media plugins so that you can join these two tools together,  making them even more powerful.

Email, meet Social Media. Social Media, meet Email.

Aweber has included social media plugins with their email application for a long time, and now Constant Contact is getting into the game too. Just this week they announced several new features that make integrating social media easy and powerful.

Tweet and Share
This automatically posts your email campaigns to your Twitter feed whenever you send an email blast.  Constant Contact lets you Tweet your emails as many times as you want.

Facebook “Like” Button
When your share your Constant Contact email on Facebook, a “Like” button appears at the top of the webpage view.

Facebook Events
This exciting new feature makes it easy for your registrants to share your event right from your Registration Confirmation and Event Details pages. Best of all, you control whether you want your event shared simply by hiding or showing the event on your event calendar.

It’s Better Together

In light of these new enhancements, now would be a terrible time to drop your email marketing efforts. Instead, use email and social media together to make an even bigger impact. If you need assistance making these two options meet, contact us, we’re experts in both email marketing and social media!

Category: Email Marketing

5 Steps to More Effective Website Pages

July 29, 2010 by Jeune Ortiz

Improving your website can be a daunting task. Where do you even start? Our best suggestion is to take your site one page at a time and apply these five steps to improve every one of them. When you’re done, you not only do better in the search engines, but your visitors will thank you.

1. Page Titles

Page titles are the text at the very top of the browser window (usually to the right of the browser logo). Make sure all your pages have page titles that describe the content on the page. Commonly you’ll see page titles that look like this: Business Name: Business Tagline. Nice idea, but in the end, ineffective. Search engines actually use the page titles to index your content. So unless you’re a national brand like Nike, Ford, or Ikea, it’s doubtful people will be using your business name or tagline in their search.

2. Headlines

Use page headers in at least three sizes. The largest, of course, would be used for the overall page header and should contain a keyword or keywords that reflect the page content. Then use the remaining header sizes to break up your content. People skim pages and look for keywords. Headlines make it easy to skim the content and entice your site visitor into actually reading your content.

3. Copywriting

From headlines to actual copy, make sure you’re conveying the benefits - not the features – of your product or service. For instance, if you’re a commercial cleaner don’t list all the names of cleaning products you use (features). Instead,  tell people how safe, clean, and well preserved their property will be when they use your service (benefit).

4. Calls to Action

After the user has read through your material, what do you want them to do next? Should they read more, download something, sign up for a newsletter, or make contact? It might seem obvious to you, but to a user who may not have ever researched your product or service they are looking for a guide. So help them out and let them know what they should do next.

5. Improve Link Verbiage

When linking to more information, “Read More” is about as dull and ineffective a link as you can get. Instead, describe the information you’re going to link to. Not only does this help the search engines keep crawling your site, it helps visitors by giving them a preview of what they are about to see. For example: “Want an even more effective website? Fix these three web design problems.”

Ready to Get an Effective Website?

We specialize in combining solid marketing strategies in every website we design. We can help you make effective changes to your site – changes that will result in more leads and sales.  Read more about our Web design service or contact us directly.

Category: Internet Marketing

E-Books: The New B2B Marketing Channel

July 28, 2010 by Jeune Ortiz

Inbound Marketing is the new online revolution which draws consumers to your business by providing useful information. E-books used to be consumed only through desktop computers, but now their portability (made possible by the e-readers) has made E-books an even bigger player in the overall picture.

Though paperback sales still outnumber both E-Book and hardcover sales, Amazon recently reported that sales of E-books now outnumber sales of hardcover books. Which means that E-book technology is gaining a hefty following and is here to stay.

Publishing Ease

The laws of Inbound Marketing decree that information be free if possible, but there are some instances where selling your information makes more sense. If you have whitepapers or other downloadable PDFs, you know how much time and effort it takes to create those documents – which is exactly why many businesses are looking to sell their information online and recoup some of their expense. If the rise of online E-book publishers is any indication, many business-to-business authors are taking advantage of this new stream of income and you can too.

Here are a few E-book publishers that make it easy:

• Lulu.com
• Iuniverse.com
• Issuu.com
• Yudu.com
• Edocr.com

Why Publish When You Can Download?

PDF downloads still dominate the web, and in a lot of cases shorter documents are still well suited to the PDF format. Most E-book readers can read PDF documents, but the functionality that makes E-book readers so easy to read on is often lacking – like the ability to increase the size of the text, make notes and highlights, and dictionary look-up. PDF documents are still very much tied to the PC screen, whereas developing content that is easily portable could mean a higher increase of readership for your materials.

If you don’t want to charge for downloads, but you still want the perks of E-book reader publishing, you’re in luck. Most of the publishers don’t require you to sell your books. Instead of a revenue share, you simply pay a small monthly fee.

Marketing With E-books

Simply browsing through any of the above publisher sites will open your eyes to marketing opportunities that you may not have thought of before. Many publisher’s sites are regularly scanned by search engines, and have high traffic. Both of these characteristics are huge benefits when trying to market your business through content.

Don’t forget calls to action! While your content maybe be indexed and read through these publishing sites, it’s critical to drive your interested prospects back to your website where you can nurture the lead.

How are you marketing with content? We’d love to hear all the ways you’re using content to drive new business and sales for your company.

Category: Internet Marketing