by Sage Lewis

American Express OPEN Forum has a good article on how to create a solid text marketing campaign. This gives you some good, concrete tips on how to get started.

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Source:
How to Create a Text Marketing Campaign

by Mike Moran

Image via Wikipedia

Often, I work with businesses trying to determine the return on investment for their online marketing. For e-commerce companies, it’s not that hard. They can use their Web analytics to see how many people are coming to the site and how many actually convert by checking out. But what if you sell offline? Then it’s not so easy.

Just about any company can put a special phone number on their site that appears nowhere else. If anyone calls it, you know they came from your Web site, so you can tie that eventual sale back to your Web marketing.

Small B2C companies need to find a way to link their online activity to what they do offline, often that involves some form of couponing. If you allow your online activities to discount your prices, or add a free gift, or provide some other service, just require the customer print out the coupon and present it when they buy.

For B2B companies, it’s usually more complicated, although couponing can work for them too. For many B2B businesses, they do face to face or phone sales through their own sales teams, or, more commonly for small B2B firms, manufacturer’s representatives. They usually find themselves passing leads that they hope the sales people will close.

At big companies, they follow these leads with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, where the lead is tracked at every contact point and evaluated as to how close they are to a sale (and what can be done next to get them over the line). Most small businesses don’t have such systems because they are expensive, but in recent years some very inexpensive CRM systems have appeared that give small businesses a way to use CRM, too. Highrise and Zoho CRM are both used by small businesses to track their prospects through to a sale. If you can hand off your online customer activity to your CRM system, then you can follow your online marketing to sales, just like the big boys.

Many small businesses fail to close the loop from Web marketing to sales because it is hard. But that omission keeps you from knowing which marketing activities are working and which ones aren’t. If you make this extra effort to track your sales, and your competitors do not, you’ll have a leg up on them that will supercharge your online marketing.

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Read more here:
How can small businesses measure offline sales?

by Mike Moran

Image by luc legay via Flickr

Social media is free, but what’s the catch? Time. We only have so much time to spend putting our message out there, but we don’t want to limit how many people can hear what we have to say. This problem comes up in many ways, but the simplest is the dichotomy between Facebook and Twitter. Many folks decide to spend the bulk of their social time on one or the other, with relatively few people using both. If Google Buzz catches fire, this fragmentation might only increase. What’s a marketer to do?

Let’s face it. There’s no real difference between “friends” and “followers,” nor between “”status updates” and “tweets.” And why would you decide to spend all your precious social media time updating one venue and not the other, if your customers use both of them? But how can you double the amount of time you spend in social media updating both?

You don’t have to. I decided that I prefer Twitter to Facebook so I have every tweet I send out mirrored as my Facebook status. And I do the same thing on LinkedIn. I haven’t taken the plunge on Google Buzz yet, but I’ll probably do the same thing there, also.

If someone wants to see what I am up to, they can use their favorite method to keep up and I only have to update once. I know people using FriendFeed to accomplish the same thing. In each of your social media lives, you can set up these mirrors to make sure that your customers can keep up no matter what network they are in, while you only need to update once.

Now, I find even though I update in only one place, that I still have trouble making time for more than a few tweets a day, but there isn’t anything I can do to help with that.

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Here is the original:
“I don’t have time for Facebook and Twitter”

by Sage Lewis

Marketing Pilgrim reports that B2B Marketers will see a 490% Increase in Social Media Spend by 2014. But there are other really interesting stats to be found in this report as well.

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B2B Marketers Making Huge Increases in Social Media Spend

by Sage Lewis

Matt Cutts has recently put out a post calling for us all to turn in link spam. Learn what he and Google are up to. This has interesting implications for you to consider.

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Source:
Matt Cutts Calling for Link Spam Reports