Author: blogger

Is Your Phone Part Of Your Marketing Plan

Attracting new clients in this economy can be a challenge. You need to get creative and adapt the way you promote yourself.

Here are a few simple strategies that you can implement and integrate in your marketing plan today. There is a tool that lots of small business neglect. It is just right there on your desk, but you may not think about it or and you may even be afraid of it.

What is this tool, I am talking about? Your phone. Yes, your phone is a powerful tool that you could use effectively to attract new clients.

In 1998 I started a telemarketing company in France and I was spending 6 to 7 hours on the phone, selling my clients products or setting up appointments for them. I know that calling prospects is not very fun, but I am not speaking of cold calling here. I don’t want you to buy lists of potentials clients and speak to total strangers. I am talking of integrating your phone as part of your follow-up system. You will contact only people that you already met at networking events or online via social media.

Let’s say that you attend networking events on a regular basis, you probably have tons of business cards on your selves or on a shoes box, and are just not doing anything with them. Go back to this pile of business cards, send an email to reintroduce yourself. Use your normal introduction about your services and ask those people what you can do for them or how you can help them. If you get a response, instead of emailing the person back, pick up the phone and call them. You already spoke with the person or met them online. It impresses people that you take the time to actually connect one on one. Make sure you are not trying to sell them anything, that is the tricky part, give them free and valuable information that could help their business. Networking is not about you, it is about them. Networking is not about selling but building a relationship.

If people don’t reply to your first email, don’t be mad, it doesn’t means they are not interested right this minute or they haven’t read your email yet, or maybe it went to spam, or they maybe too busy at the moment. There is no reason to fret. There are a thousand reasons people don’t get back to you right away. Wait for few days or a couple of weeks and send another email or send them some information by mail. You remember the old way to do business – using the post office, well it still works, but only if you actually use it! Combining email and mail doubles your chance to reach people and double your rate of answers. When you pick up the phone after a couple of exchanges, you will see that you will get a lot more chance to attract clients.

After all this online and print information they have received from you they already know about you and your business. They know you care about their problems and can provide them valuable information, so they will either take the time to speak with you on a spot or if you call at a bad time you will get a chance to schedule a phone appointment to speak with them at a later date.

What about calling your previous clients, they already know and like working with you? Do you have a new product or service that you would like to tell them about? Always remember to list the benefits and describe how your new product will help them. Too many small business owners are too busy selling and marketing that they neglect their current clients. It is much easier to have a client become a repeat client than to get a new client. So check your database, who could you call right now?

I don’t have my telemarketing company anymore but on my French consulting business “My French Network” that I started in the US few years ago, I still use the same techniques. I contact each and every person who contacted me for a free consultation. Starting a business in the US for a foreigner can take months or years, time to find the funds or get all the immigration requirements. I give my clients a call within 3 months of the consultation to make sure they are getting somewhere in their process. Then I give them a call at least every 3 months to get updates on their project. If they are still not ready for my help I may call them every 6 months. In the meantime I keep sending my newsletter, stay on top of their mind and check up via email to keep them interested. When I call they are not surprised; they do not reject my call. They are actually glad to see that I still follow their cases and I am still there to help them; I am still building the relationship.

So pick up your phone NOW.

Call your previous clients; reconnect with the people you met since the beginning of the year. Find out how you can help them. Create a follow-up system to keep in touch with them on a regular basis. Don’t just call once and forget about it. Use software like Act or OutLook Express to set reminders of when to call. Schedule a few hours a week to call your contacts and clients. Try it for the next 30 days, track your results, and then check how many new clients come rolling in. You will be surprised by the results. Integrate the process into your daily marketing plan.

Your own phone can change your business, it is as simple as that.

Creating a follow-up system is an integral part of Power of Networking Secrets. You will discover the step-by-step process to integrate and customize simple, yet effective strategies to put your follow-up system on auto-pilot. You will do the set-up work once then let your system work for you! so you will work once, then your system will work for you.
Check Out here PowerofNetworkingSecrets.com

If you like this article and want more networking tips to attract clients, get my Free Audio “Networking Made Easy” at http://www.powerofnetworkingsecrets.com

Biba F. Pdron, Business & Marketing Consultant, founder of Biba4Network, also knows as “The Connection Queen”, helps solo-entrepreneurs to maximize their networking results and reveal proven strategies to attract more clients and double your business with simple but effective networking system.

Biba is the author of “Start Your Dream Business Today! The Proven 11 Steps to Start and Grow Your Own Business”. And “Power of Networking Secrets” a program teaching you step-by-step how to turn more networking contacts into business boosting clients in 7 simple steps.

Improved Marketing By Using Social Sites

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube changes, with the help of a Tutorial, how small and medium sized companies can gain followings in tens of thousands and get sales to go up and up.

The company realized that even with a skilled team of Internet Marketing consultants, the new marketing media emerging from Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and other sites, made it necessary, that also they themselves learned it all, again.

The company therefore decided to locate the planet’s ten finest specialists in Social Media Marketing.

After hearing many mind-blowing success stories, they decided on establishing a close cooperation with someone who really knew about social media marketing and had a large following.

The person selected was Mr. Reinhard Muller. Born in Scandinavia, with a prestigious career in advertising, Reinhard moved some year ago to the South of France, specialising in Internet Marketing. Then Social Media Marketing started to take off – and Reinhard saw the ‘possibilities’ and became passionate about this new media, making himself and his team into one of the world’s top specialist operating on Twitter, MyFace and Youtube.

Reinhard Muller created a program which brings any person, unsure about Social Media, to understand this new marketing media and be able to use Social Media commercially, promoting their own business. It can be operated in limited geographical areas.

Social Media Marketing is used by start-up and established companies, manufacturing units, artists, local suppliers, restaurants, authors, dentists, printers, publishers, hotels, caterers, delicatessens, supermarkets, sports-clubs, health clubs, estate agents, photographers, retail shops, hairdressers etc.

Companies uses Social Media Marketing primary – a recent poll made clear – to interact in a new way with customers – one to one – to drive the most motivated traffic to their website and stop damaging complaints or disputes with their customers, which nowadays due to the power of Social sites can spread like a wild-fire.

There is no marketing cost when using Social Media Marketing, which is why it has become so popular, but an investment in 2 x 15 minutes daily is vital.

These are many large companies using Social Media Marketing on a daily basis: Amazon, Dell, Motorola, Starbucks, Urban Outfitters, ComCast, Vodafone, Quantas, Virgin, Ford, Samsung, Kodak and so it goes on.

One can learn to administer the time working on Social Media by promoting the right person inside the company. How to improve the company’s reputation and increase brand awareness, building a huge and growing following in thousands and ten thousands on Twitter, Facebook,Youtube and other Social sites.

Here are four examples from well-known organizations.

The wizardly world of Harry Potter. Cindy Gordon, vice president of new media partnership at Universal Orlando Resort together with her counterpart at Warner Bros, realizing that millions of people are passionate about all things Harry Potter, pinpointed seven people at the top of various Harry Potter fan sites and invited them to participate in a top-secret Webcast. And those seven people told tens of thousands. It is estimated that by the power of word-of-mouse, 350 million people round the world heard the news. No expensive marketing.

Dell computers. The goal was to bring back the connection with the consumer in an innovative way and sell more products. The budget was zero. Social Media Marketing was introduced. Contacts with clients were started. Questions were answered right away. It all was suddenly very live and active on a 24-hour basis. Mark Jarvis, Dell Computers CMO, estimate the initiative created half million turnover and loads of good will for the well-known brand.

Zappos shoes. Founded in 1999, selling nothing the first year. Now projecting a billion dollars in turnover for 2009. The company’s impressive reputation for service has been build up by word of mouth and recommendation via Social Marketing. Without Social Media Marketing this would not have been possible. Zappos even train their employees on the effective use of Social Media. Four hundred employees now use Twitter. The company CEP uses Twitter for everyday business. To sell shoes the staff talk with customers and invite them and their friends to ‘happy hours’ organised by the company.

Club Med. The Club decided to send a good blogger on an all expenses paid holiday to Chamonix, to describe the experience exactly as it was on Twitter and place photos via TwitterR. Her messages were taken up by many blogs and then spread between like-minded people. The cost of sending someone on holiday became out of proportion to the enormous buzz created round the Club Med at Chamonix followed by long term bookings.

Barack Obama Presidential Campaign Manager David Meerman Scott used Social Media Marketing and sound principles when running the Presidential Internet Campaign.

The financial crises and now a few Green Shoots appearing, has made Social Media Marketing the marketing tool of the time, which more and more companies turn to. The no cost, being fast – and the enormous audience has made it to, what thousands of start-ups, small and medium sized companies are concidering just now.

Defining Digital Marketing Agency

If you need to augment your business, then you should hire a digital marketing agency as it can greatly help you to grow it. Those are bygone days, when advertisers only have to look towards outbound marketing methods that include radio, television, banners, hoardings, flyers, etc. to promote businesses. Nowadays in the world of the computers and internet technology, inbound marketing has become an important factor to market products and services.

Keeping in view of the fact people at present use their web resources to shop, gather information, sell, and to do a lot more, hiring the services of a digital marketing agency has become a need.

The work of a digital marketing agency includes SEO (Search engine optimization), PPC (Pay per click advertising), SEM (Search engine marketing), SMO (Social media optimization), SMM (Social media marketing), ORM (Online reputation management), Email marketing, just to name a few. But the most important ones are SEO, SMO, and PPC. Let’s throw some light on them one by one.

Search engine optimization

It is the method to augment the website’s ranking as well as visibility over search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Broadly it is categorized into on-page and off-page SEO. On-page SEO comprise the practice of optimizing on-page elements such as meta title, meta descriptions, etc. and also includes technical SEO that comprises the activity of increasing page load speed, finding and rectifying site errors like 404 page error, etc., uploading sitemap and robots.txt file, canonical tags, redirects, and more. Further off-page SEO includes submission of content (which has been written around your relevant keywords) such as articles, blogs, directories, classifieds, and more.

Make sure your content should be of high quality and original seeing that search engines will favor content that is most relevant to the user’s query and which provides some value to the user.

Pay per click Marketing

It is an eminent method of digital advertising and producing traffic to a site. The fundamental theory is that the advertiser has his ad showed on sites or Google and pays the owner of the site or Google (advertisement’s publisher) only when a user clicks on his advertisement. That click will land the user to the advertiser’s website.

Social media optimization

It is the method of creating, managing, and optimizing of social media accounts. Seeing that millions of people are now on social media, this is a wonderful platform to increase your brand awareness and making it common among people. Generate user engagement and search engines will come consider it as social signals and increase the rankings of your website over them.

Choosing the Best Email Marketing Service for Your Business

Businesses use email marketing because it’s a good source of repeat sales and an important customer retention technique, but dependendable software is required for successful e-newsletter campaigns. AWeber, Constant Contact and MailChimp are the top email marketing software programs and have their own pros and cons. Learn more about what makes each email marketing service unique, so you can make an educated decision for your company.

AWeber: Feature-Filled Email Marketing Software

AWeber is well known for its spam scoring system that warns you if your e-newsletter has a high chance of being marked as spam. As a result of its strict anti-spam policy, this email marketing software has built a good relationship with Internet service providers and 99% of e-newsletters are delivered to inboxes instead of junk mail folders. AWeber also offers unique features such as shopping cart integration and an online archive of your e-newsletters that can be linked from your website as well as through social media.

Constant Contact: Excellent Customer Service

Constant Contact and AWeber are often compared as they have similar pricing and features. Nevertheless, Constant Contact has been able to set itself apart in terms of its customer support. In addition to a toll-free number for the United States and Canada, this email marketing service has a free phone number for the United Kingdom and another dedicated line for international customers. Any customer who phones in is offered “personal coaching” through the many features of the email marketing software. Constant Contact also places more emphasis on social media with social statistics, an integrated e-newsletter social sharing button called “Simple Share” and further customer service through the company’s social media platforms.

MailChimp: An Email Marketing Service for Beginners

Although MailChimp has less features and was founded later than the other two email marketing software programs, its main advantage is that it’s completely free to use if your company has less than 2,000 subscribers. It’s often ideal to start with this email marketing service and you can import your subscribers into other email marketing software platforms as your list grows. The primary disadvantages of using MailChimp is that its free version doesn’t allow you to set up autoresponders (automatic emails) and analytics data is less comprehensive, but this email marketing service should be more than enough to use for new businesses.

ROI Web Hosting uses email marketing in marketing packages catered to everyone’s budget. We support you in all aspects of your online presence.

Upcoming Challenges For Mobile Development & Mobile Marketing

The digital world is evolving and the trends are changing in real world, making the world faster than ever before and technology more stable. Mobile is all about today’s world which took birth with the invention of first pager in 1956. The world started getting mobile and the launch of first commercial mobile phone by NTT in Japan was the next step to stabilize this mobility.

The innovation in this mobility with SMS happened to be originated in Europe in 1985. SMS was a boom in the later part of 1900s and early 2000s, and still it’s the top cellular activity. Now, there’re above 4 billion mobile phone subscribers, with 74% of them using SMS of which 94% of SMSs are read. Just in UK 1.4 billion text messages now being sent every week.

This is just about mobile phones and SMS, innovations like iPhone, Blackberry, Android and mobile-internet integration are constanly opening the new horizons of excellence for mobile marketing. Web marketing is one of the most cost effective marketing methods with maximum outreach. Since there’re more mobile phone subscribers than that of internet users, so mobile opens broad ways for marketing from small and medium to large businesses.

Mobile-web integrated marketed is still in the process of development, reason being the lack of awareness among most of mobile phone subscribers, i.e. there’re about 10 million users worldwide using GPRS services that makes only about 0.25% of the total subscribers. But, this low percentage doesn’t mean that mobile marketing is not growing. There’re various alternative methods within mobile marketing including SMS Marketing, Ingame Mobile Marketing, Location Based Services etc.

Ingame Mobile Marketing is the fastly growing area and the future of mobile marketing. The reason is that more than 90% of mobile phone subscribers play mobile games. From simple interactive real-time 3D games to massive multi-player and social networking games, mobile gaming is everywhere. This trend is accelerating the growth of mobile 2.0 on one hand and hence the mobile development on other.

Mobile development being the next big thing is now the focus of small, medium and large business, and hence it’s becoming a competitive industry. The cometition is becoming tougher as the industry leaders Nokia and Google have moved to opensource, and this situation is critical for ISVs. ZDNet also reports that, it’ll not be the great UI as only challenge instead, things that matter more are ideas and methodologies. Though ISV’s are more under pressure, but companies will have equal pressure and will have to face almost same challenges. It’ll be the race of collective innovation [what I can term it as] or Product Innovation [combination of innovation in methodologies, design, productivity etc] so, innovation in over all performance will win!