6 Tips for Turning Internet Marketing into Relationship Marketing

Internet Marketing Seminar of Prof. Erwin Globio

erwinglobio.sulit.com.ph - Saturday, September 24, 2011

2011 © Sulit.com.ph

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

6 Tips for Turning Internet Marketing into Relationship Marketing

A good relationship with your loyal customers is worth a fortune. Hence, relationship marketing should be at the heart of your business.

Why is relationship marketing priceless?

Internet marketing = Relationship Marketing

When everything you do revolves around your community – customers, fans, followers, employees, etc. – the answer is clear. You will have the reputation, loyalty and love that keeps your business alive and thriving. You will have a connection with your audience, and that’s the key to success for your company.

Take the focus away from the dollar signs attached to your products and services, and focus on what’s really going to affect your sales: relationships.

Relationship marketing online is a fine balanceof technology and personality.

Something that has remained constant throughout the years is the power of relationships in business. Relationship marketing these days is just present in a different arena – online.

There are people who may insist that there were no problems of disconnect until the Internet came along. This simply isn’t the case. Technology is not the cause of this disconnect; the cause is the people behind the computers.

If your online presence is genuine and your brand is “real,” relationships will blossom.

And since nearly 90% of consumers use search engines to make purchasing decision (Digital Influence Index), you better believe that a strong community presence will feed your bottom line.

Relationship marketing from the ground up

To create a healthy community online, set up a steady foundation for your relationship marketing.

1.   1.  Understand your audience. Identify your niche market and how you plan to solve their problems. Have a clear vision for who your products and services are going to help so you can target them more directly with a message that resonates more powerfully.

2.   2.  Engage with your audience. Write with your audience’s wants and needs in mind. Listen to their feedback – good or bad – and give them a say in the conversation. Conversation is a two-way street, and there’s a difference between talking to people versus talking with them.

3.   3.  Be a part of your community. Be present in conversations about your own brand and your industry. A good relationship marketing strategy covers all aspects of a community – from customers to competitors. Find ways to join in on relevant conversations, offering your own opinion, experience, expertise and input. Just be sure you have something worth saying.

4.   4.  Demonstrate your expertise. One component of your relationship marketing strategy must address the fact that there is competition for what you’re offering. People will respect and listen to you more intently if your language is confident, clear and beneficial. If you’re not the expert in a certain area, that’s okay. Seek the advice or help of a non-competitor who knows the subject through and through, and give them credit for their knowledge.

5.    5.  Answer questions. Create free downloads, pay close attention to what people are asking on social media sites, and set up a blog dedicated to helping visitors find the answers to their most common questions. Your customers want to be acknowledged and appreciated.

6.    6. Provide excellent service. Don’t just stop online with your relationship marketing. Continue the process offline and really show your customers that you appreciate them. Treat them with respect before, during and after a sale.

Final thoughts

The purpose of relationship marketing is to put the “people” back in business and ignite that “warm and fuzzy” feeling. It’s about having actual human beings dedicated to nurturing your online presence and every person that is a part of it.

Take the focus away from profits, put it back on relationships, and trust that the profits will come as a result. That’s relationship marketing in a nutshell.

Are you building relationships with your internet marketing?

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

Internet Marketing Seminar of Prof. Erwin Globio

erwinglobio.sulit.com.ph - Saturday, September 24, 2011

2011 © Sulit.com.ph

Forming That Internet Marketing Bond

Internet Marketing Seminar of Prof. Erwin Globio

erwinglobio.sulit.com.ph - Saturday, September 24, 2011

2011 © Sulit.com.ph

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

Forming That Internet Marketing Bond

No matter how many marketing platforms become available to businessmen to sell their products and services, one thing remains essential: creating that sincere relationship with the customers

You can bore someone into buying your product or you can develop a bond that will generate bigger market share.” These, according to OgilvyOne Worldwide VP for Consulting Services in Asia Pacific Lucy McCabe, are the two general things business owners can do with social media.

“Selling a brand or a product now is more complicated as compared to 10 years ago,” says McCabe in a recent press briefing on social Customer Relations Management (CRM). Not only do business owners and marketers have to learn newer platforms, they also need to determine how to take full advantage of these tools.

Social media has not only affected the way customers pick brands, it has also changed how and to whom people give their feedback. A few years back, when a customer had something to say about a product or service he acquired, he would share it with his family and friends in a confined gathering. Nowadays, a customer can share his thoughts on a certain product or service not just to his friends but even to people across the globe. Most of the time, sharing is so instantaneous that even if he is still in the process of experiencing it, he is already sharing it to the world via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Path.

E-commerce is also giving more brands the vehicle to reach a wider market. In Asia, the growth of e-commerce is expected to surge as more infrastructures mature and develop. Products that we only see in stores can now be purchased in just a click.

The above scenarios sound healthy. But the problem, McCabe points out, is that the brands are having a hard time catching up. For a brand manager, McCabe says as an example, managing the output or the product feedback within the world of social media can actually be scary. At the same time, a lot of brands are still learning the ropes of e-commerce. She said the challenge for marketers in the next five years is to understand how to make use of these media to their advantage.

“A lot of brands struggle as to what their e-commerce strategy should be,” shares McCabe. “It’s not just about the shopping carts, it’s the whole shopping experience—the process of discovering the product all the way to the purchase,” she says, adding that sharing this experience is crucial.

Bond With Your Customers

In a world where digitalization is one of the key trends, online recommendation greatly influences purchase. In fact, McCabe says online recommendation is in the top five influences on purchases in almost every single market in Asia. “That’s a massive shift from 10 years ago,” she reveals. And based on their surveys, she says recommendation is a key driver of market share.

That is why “bonding” with the customers—whether existing or potential—is important. “Bonding is when you feel a real emotional affinity to the brand,” explains McCabe. “If you’ve bonded with a brand that you trust, you will recommend it.” She adds that customers who have bonded with the brands they trusted spend up to at least 20 percent more recommending those to other people. “The higher the level of bonding, the higher the future level of marketing share, so there’s a direct correlation between that bonding score and the market share. It’s a critical number,” she says.

To be able to create that bond, one must earn the customers’ trust. “Trust and recommendation are big drivers of market. If you don’t have these with your customers, your brand is less likely to grow,” she says. This is how social CRM becomes the new era of relationship marketing. It’s building a relationship with your market through social media. For business owners and marketers, this means being perceptive of their audience. “Understand your audience, segment them; what will interest them? Understanding the audience means giving them the right content they need,” she points out. This is very important in this highly digital age and marketers now must have a rigorous approach on how to use the technology available to them.

“It’s like your relationship with your friends—it involves a lot of communication, of valuing their opinion, of celebrating with them, working with them, of learning how to be there for them and when to leave them alone at the same time,” she says. And if you find this kind of relationship with a brand you like, chances are you will share this experience with other people

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

.

The Internet vs. Facebook in 10 Years [infographic]

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online The Internet vs. Facebook in 10 Years [infographic]

When we take pause to appreciate where we are, we can truly appreciate just how far we’ve come. I recently stumbled across an interesting infographic as it made the rounds across the social web recently. Created by bestedsites.com, the graphic visualizes the meteoric rise of the Internet in just 10 years. For example, in 2002, the Internet boasted 569 million users, which represented 9.1% of the world population. In 2012, that number skyrocketed to 2.27 billion at 33% of the world population. Another tremendous stat is the daily time spent online. In 2002 it was only 46 minutes a day (that was probably the time it took to load one web site). In 2012, it’s clocked four hours a day. As I was reveling in the rapid evolution and ascent of the internet in general, I took stock of Facebook’s growth. Well, I suppose not literally. Looking at Facebook as a subset of this particular infographic would provide a visual comparison of the static and social web. I once wrote that to the connected consumer, the end of the destination web was upon us. The flow of information has been disrupted. While websites aren’t dead they certainly don’t meet the needs and expectations of a much more real-time audience who live in their egosystem and benefit from news and information finding them. We live in an era where news no longer breaks, it Tweets. As such, I’d love to see a visual comparison of the destination and social web and the numbers between them. In 2011, Facebook was the size of the Internet in 2004 That’s certainly a dramatic headline. And, it’s true. Last year, when Facebook hit 800 million users, Royal Pingdom reported that not only was the milestone significant in terms of user base, it was the size of the entire Internet in 2004. In July 2012, Facebook reported that its user count was approaching 1 billion with 955 million active users and counting. Those numbers are almost too big to truly grasp. So, I again took pause. In 2004, thefacebook launched for Harvard University students. Within 24 hours, thefacebook was already home to somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 students according to co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Within the first month, more than half of all Harvard students were registered. By October 2005, “the” was dropped from the company name, Facebook.com was purchased for $200,000, Sean Parker was now the company president, Facebook moved to Palo Alto, and the company opened the network to universities around the world. Over the course of eight years, the site continued to experience incredible growth, a story of which you’re more than familiar with today. Here’s a timeline representing milestones for each jump of 100 million users: August 26, 2008 = 100 million users April 8, 2009 =200 million users September 15, 2009 = 300 million February 5, 2010 = 400 million July 21, 2010 = 500 million January 5, 2011 = 600 million May 30, 2011 = 700 million September 22, 2011 = 800 million April 24, 2012 = 900 million Now (August 2012) = 955 million users CNET recently reported that as many as 8.7 percent of users are fake. Just to clarify, not fake as in shallow personalities, but fake as in bogus accounts that represent duplicates, misclassified, undesirable, spam, etc. But event at 8.7 percent, the the overall number of people who use Facebook in one way or another is staggering. It is its own Internet and that’s both frightening and fascinating. My colleagues at Altimeter Group Andrew Jones (@andrewjns), Christine Tran (@christineptran) and I took a look at the numbers to plot them on the infographic to truly visualize how big Facebook really is. Accounting for the 8.7% of fake accounts, Facebook represents 28% of all Internet users at ~12% of the world’s population (estimated at 7 billion).

Some day, I’d love to see Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, the Internet overall, side by side to show the different behaviors in information flow. Please feel free to share any numbers or infographics you’ve created that expand on this story. Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

Demystifying Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing Seminar of Prof. Erwin Globio

erwinglobio.sulit.com.ph - Saturday, September 24, 2011

2011 © Sulit.com.ph

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

Demystifying Internet Marketing

Whether your business is a solo operation providing a simple service or a retail organization selling hundreds of products, it's important to have an internet marketing strategy in place.

With over 600 million people now using the web regularly internet marketing allows you to reach the growing number of people who spend time online. It also gives you more bang for the buck than traditional shotgun-style advertising and public relations because it enables you to better target prospective customers.

As well, internet marketing allows you to improve your reach within a narrow base of customers with specific needs or interests who are spread out over a large geographic area. Best of all, internet marketing is often less expensive than traditional marketing methods.

Among the most common internet marketing tools:

E-mail: the electronic version of direct marketing is a popular way to deliver messages to prospective customers.

Webinars or seminars delivered online: can be an effective way of demonstrating a product or explaining your service or merchandise.

Video: posted on your website can be a good way for manufacturers and service providers to increase sales by showing prospects the features of your product.

E-newsletters: delivered via email or on websites, can help you create communities of customers and attract prospects.

Blogs or online journals: are becoming an increasingly popular form of internet marketing. They allow users to comment and provide insight, and can create an instant buzz about your product. They need to be kept updated with useful information.

Expertise documents: such as white papers and case studies are growing in popularity as a marketing method, since they elicit greater trust among web users than do blatant sales messages.

Well-designed websites: whether focused on information or sales, can help you win business.

Search engine optimization: involves tweaking the design and content of websites to maximize the odds they will show up in online searches. Since about 80% of e-commerce is generated through search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN , it's critical for users to be able to find your site easily.

Pay-per-click advertising: involves paying for ads that appear when certain keywords are typed into search engines. This can be prohibitively expensive unless you choose keywords that are meaningful to users.

Online information distribution: is delivered by websites to customers who submit profiles of their needs and subjects of interest. E-marketers can use these sites to deliver targeted messages.

Whatever form of internet marketing you choose, keep the following pointers in mind:

Understand your customers. Service businesses will use different marketing techniques from product-based businesses because their customers' buying behaviour is different. Likewise, if your product is consumed by a narrow market, the marketing message you choose should be customized to suit that market.

Make choices. Internet marketing means ignoring some prospective customers; it's the opposite of the old mass-marketing system that emphasized sending sales messages to as many people as possible. The good news is that targeted customers have a higher likelihood of buying.

Work with fewer customers. Internet marketing often targets small market niches. This means messages are sent to fewer people than would be the case in conventional advertising. But the people who receive the message are more likely to buy. It's crucial, then, to know your targeted audience intimately.

Measure and analyse how well your tools are working. Readily available software packages can help you test techniques, gather information on buyer preferences and refine offers so as to appeal more effectively to those preferences.

Be innovative and flexible. Try new techniques, measure performance and then adjust your website and marketing tools to better reflect results.

Be entertaining. Web users usually prefer information presented in an entertaining or novel way. So you could use humour, satire or visuals to gain attention.

B2B Internet marketing 

While much attention is focused on sales of consumer products on the web, the reality is that only about 25% of online commerce involves sales of products to consumers. Most online commerce involves e-business or business-to-business (B2B) transactions.

The web has become the information library of choice for business customers who are scanning the market for potential goods or services. As a result, a sophisticated methodology has evolved for online marketing to businesses.

There are a number of differences between business buyers and consumer buyers that you should keep in mind.

Businesses often use the web to conduct research, while consumers tend to look for specific products. Marketers reinforce this behaviour by providing useful and educational material to businesses via the web.
When marketing to businesses, generating sales leads is more important than conducting transactions. With consumers, the opposite is usually true.

Business customers are usually beginning their shopping experience when they go online and are in the process of gathering general information. On the other hand, consumers are often near the end of that experience and are narrowing down their options or comparing choices.

Most businesses use the Google search engine to conduct research, while consumers are more likely to use other engines like Yahoo and Bing.

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

Internet Marketing Seminar of Prof. Erwin Globio

erwinglobio.sulit.com.ph - Saturday, September 24, 2011

2011 © Sulit.com.ph

Seven Tips to Improve Website Search Rankings

Internet Marketing Seminar of Prof. Erwin Globio

erwinglobio.sulit.com.ph - Saturday, September 24, 2011

2011 © Sulit.com.ph

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

Seven Tips to Improve Website Search Rankings

With more than 644 million estimated active websites on the internet today and growing, businesses need to work harder to get noticed online. For small businesses that don’t already have an established market presence this means finding ways to do more with less – and that’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play.
SEO is about making a company’s website as visible as possible when related information is requested through different search methods such as engines like Google or Bing. Most large, well-established and tech savvy companies have the advantage of prominence and often more budget to put into creating brand recognition.
If smaller businesses are looking for budget-friendly ways to maximize their chances of being found through search and attracting more traffic to their website, there are a few SEO-related tactics they can employ themselves with their website to help with that.
Whether a business is in the process of building a website in-house or working with an external developer and wanting to understand or speak their language here are seven tips for businesses to improve their site’s search rankings:

1. Secure Links – For SEO this means reaching out to industry associations, loyal clients and other complimentary businesses to encourage them to link to your site from areas like their blogs and resource pages. This is a signal that search engines, such as Google use in their rankings algorithms and will help to improve a website’s rankings.
2. Update content regularly – Ensuring content is unique, compelling and fresh is key to keeping the attention of website visitors. Consider blog posts, videos, images, webinars, eBooks, widgets, infographics, and primary research as ways to renew content on a regular basis.
3. Variety in content  – A Forrester study found that pages containing a mixture of text and video are 50 times more likely to rank higher in search results. Make sure to include more than one type of content sharing per web page.
4. Ensure the site is “social media optimized” – With the growing influence that social media has on a company’s relationship with potential and existing customers, it’s vital to ensure all website pages have the company’s social profile icons (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest). These icons encourage and make it easy to share the information and increase the chance of it being found in a search.
5. Use keywords in page titles - Ensure each website page has a title that is relevant and unique. The title should contain keywords that are related to how the company wants its website – or that page – to be found through search. (eg: the title “Dentist Toronto” would help a site rank for the term ‘dentist Toronto.'
   
6. Ensure main navigation links contain keywords - Again, focusing on keywords, it is important to include text links containing relevant keywords that reflect the way a business would want its primary pages to be found. (eg: if you’re a dentist and want to rank for  ‘Teeth Whitening’, links to the teeth whitening page should say ‘teeth whitening’.)
7. Offer unique and valuable content – Content that is unique, user-friendly and valuable encourages sharing and gives Google the social signals needed to believe that the page does in fact deserve to rank in their search results. In future, search engines will put much more trust in such social signals and those producing great content will be the net beneficiaries.

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

Internet Marketing Seminar of Prof. Erwin Globio

erwinglobio.sulit.com.ph - Saturday, September 24, 2011

2011 © Sulit.com.ph

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

5 Internet Marketing Strategies That Don’t Work

1. Image Search –> Anything that produces income. This strategy works great if you want to boost your ego, because it can be extremely effective for getting traffic. However, if you care about internet marketing or making money, image-search does almost nothing for you. I challenge anyone to take a stream of image searchers and to try to get them to act. Getting them to click ads is extremely difficult and getting them to make a purchase is even more difficult.

2. Personal Blogging –> Adsense. The bottom line is that people don’t really care about us. They are self interested. If you are trying to establish a blog while hoping that people are getting interested in YOU, you have a long road ahead of you. People care about what you can provide to them – they care about how you can solve their problems.

3. Social traffic –> Adsense. It doesn’t take degree from MIT to figure this one out. Social traffic rarely clicks ads of any kind. This happens because more often than not, these individuals are looking for entertainment. They also have a solid understanding of what ads are, and what they can expect to see if they click one. You can expect social traffic to click on an ad less than 0.25% of the time they hit one of your pages. That means you’ll need 400 social visitors to produce one click IF you’re lucky.

4. Social traffic –> Sales. Social traffic is also extremely difficult to sell to. Again, these people are looking for entertainment and honestly, are often information addicts. However, it is often possible to get them to subscribe to a feed and then convince them to make a purchase later.

5. PPC –> Adsense. People were making a killing with ‘Adsense Artbitrage’ a few short years ago. However, this is almost impossible to do in today’s climate. Google’s smart-pricing made this a LOT harder. There are still people claiming that it can be done, but as you might guess, these people are almost always trying to sell you a product that tells you how to do it.

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

Internet Marketing: 5 Ways to Spot an Internet Charlatan

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online 

Internet Marketing: 5 Ways to Spot an Internet Charlatan

As Web and internet marketing become hotter and hotter, more and more of our field will experience an influx of people who will claim to be “experts.” Here’s a list of how to spot an Internet charlatan — someone you should avoid, whether they are in a sales or creative position — if they say any of the following:

1. “THIS” Works

I begin with the bête noir of our lofty field — the idea that there is a magic bullet. There is no digital magic bullet, and there is no holder of a digital magic gun. Creating content that converts users to customers, tagging pages so they show up high in search results, developing code that loads quickly and designing user-friendly and graphically pleasing interfaces requires hard work, the combination and talent of many and an iterative approach.

If someone tells you that one service they sell will solve all your digital marketing challenges, they are (Drumroll!!! Lightning!!! Thunder!!!) an Internet Charlatan.

2. Links are the Only Things That Matter

This is my personal favorite and it drives me crazy, because it is partially true. Links are not the only aspect of your internet marketing that matter, but they are critically important to your search results, rankings and perceived quality of your content. However, we all know from Google Penguin and Panda updates that shoddy links are not going to get you anywhere fast.

Building an online reputation comes from building relationships. Links to and from other people’s blogs, social media, articles and comments are critical. Quality links arise from people who want to build relationships because of the quality and value of your content.

If someone tells you that links are the only things that matter, they are (Drumroll!!! Lightning!!! Thunder!!!) an Internet Charlatan.

3. We’ll Get You on the First Page of Google

It is sad that we still need to cover this, but as more people take an interest in spending money on internet marketing, more people will be fooled by this lie. The Internet is so competitive now (trust me — you think your customized baby straws are the only ones out there? Someone else in Texas (and China) is already making them.)

Being on the first page of Google is very important, as studies show that most people will click on one of those links. That should absolutely be your goal for the keywords that drive qualified leads to your website.

However, you should not believe anyone who tells you they can guarantee your results on the first page of Google. They cannot guarantee it, or they’re doing something illegal and trust me, Google will unleash some code with a name of a black and white animal whose name begins with a P and all your money, and potentially your hard work will roll right down the proverbial drain. Plus, Google may ban you, and then at that point, why are we still even having this conversation?

If someone tells you that they can get you on the first page of Google, they are (Drumroll!!! Lightning!!! Thunder!!!) an Internet Charlatan.

4. We can Definitely do That

Just today, with two different clients, I had conversations that appalled me. During one, a client informed me that a big consulting group told them they could implement a taxonomy during the contract negotiation phase and now, during the implementation phase they admit “they’ve never done one before.” Another client picked a designer who submitted a design that looks almost identical to their competitor’s website. (These are the days I hate consultants.)

When a company, or a consultant, or a design shop, or anyone, really, tells you they can do “that,” ask them for examples, samples and results.

If someone tells you they can do that, without proof of having done it before, they are (Drumroll!!! Lightning!!! Thunder!!!) an Internet Charlatan.

5. We Have a Secret Sauce for That

You know who gets to say “We have a secret sauce for that?” Google. Coca-Cola. Kentucky Fried Chicken. Yep … that’s about it.

If a consultant or company tells you they have a secret way of researching keywords, or a secret way of prototyping, or a secret way of knowing what your target audience wants, then they are either wizards from Hogwarts or liars. I am not talking about software that helps you write SEO code on the backend or a product like that. I’m talking about people who try to sell you on a proprietary way of doing something that doesn’t have some transparency.

For example, when my clients ask me how I do my SEO research, I tell them. I even hand them spreadsheets. What I do isn’t rocket science or neurosurgery, and even if it was, I think you have to be transparent about those things, too. “Hi Doctor, how do you plan on accessing my brain to take out my tumor?” “It’s a secret, Madam. How dare you even ask me?” Uh huh.

If someone tells you they have a secret sauce they won’t share, they are (Drumroll!!! Lightning!!! Thunder!!!) an Internet Charlatan.

So — in your opinion — how has an Internet Charlatan bamboozled you?

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online