With the dawn of a new year, businesses are reevaluating their marketing priorities in an attempt to put themselves on track for a profitable year. With our knowledge and experience, we at SMEketing can help you develop an online digital marketing plan to help your company thrive in 2012.

Unlike in the past, online marketing has become one of the primary ways in which companies reach potential customers. In a recent study published by the Pew Foundation, it was found that 96 percent of young adults and 87 percent of older adults use search engines to find out information about products and services. Additionally, search engine use behaviour indicates that users tend to only follow links to sites listed on the first page of search results. Social media has also taken on a whole life of its own, with 78 to 84 percent of users depending on social media to research products, according to Digby. Both of these trends point to the importance of using digital marketing services as a means to attract and interact with potential customers to increase sales.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, has long been one of the primary methods used to improve search engine ranking to increase website traffic. Our view at SMEketing is that ultimately, high levels of website traffic translate into increased opportunities for sales. SEO efforts can include the use of keywords in website structure, high quality content that naturally integrates targeted and long string keyword phrases and article marketing, just to name a few methods used.

Often, website structure is overlooked by business owners as a method to improve search engine ranking. However, if keywords are integrated into page titles and in website names, it increases the opportunities for users to find the website.

There is a saying among internet marketers – “Content is King” – and it is definitely true. Quality content includes blogs, product descriptions and overall content that is keyword rich and delivers valuable information to readers. It is recommended that almost all businesses have a blog as part of their website. Blog content can include helpful information about products, background information and profiles of key employees, industry information and general information that customers might find interesting.

Article marketing can also be an especially helpful and effective method of search engine optimisation. Quality articles are written that contain targeted and long string keyword phrases and links to your website. Additionally, when they are submitted to high quality article directories, company information is included with the article. The value of article marketing is multilayered. High quality content articles establish you as an authority and expert in your field and industry. They also provide high quality backlinks to your website. Finally, they provide a means for interested readers to go to your website, increasing website traffic and sales.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is an amazing phenomenon that has grown by leaps and bounds just in the past several years. With such high numbers of people using social media as a resource for product information, it is smart business to concentrate marketing efforts using this medium.

Social media can be used for many different goals. It is a wonderful way to increase quality backlinks and website traffic with a minimum amount of effort. With a single posting, you can literally create hundreds, if not thousands, of backlinks when the message goes out to your followers. If those followers find the message valuable, they will re-post it to their own network of followers, creating yet another wave of backlinks and website traffic.

Social media posts can be used to announce sales, introduce new products and create a positive reputation online for you and your company. In recent reports, users have indicated that they often turn to online recommendations or recommendations from friends when making purchase decisions. As a result, conducting a positive online PR campaign can reap tremendous benefits.

The value and importance of online marketing cannot be underscored enough in today’s digital atmosphere. If you are looking for experience and knowledge for digital marketing services for your company, please contact us at SMEketing. Offering premier internet marketing in Hampshire, we will provide you with an honest analysis of your current online marketing efforts and make recommendations to improve your online presence and search engine ranking.

So, along with getting healthy, drinking less, exercising more and vowing to do a number of other activities in 2012, think about making some of these changes to your Twitter account and activity:

Filter Who You Follow

You may be following a number of accounts that are no longer active. Following these accounts is a waste of time. Plus it’s generally seen to be better if you have a higher ratio of follower’s to those your follow. This helps to reduce the amount of wasteful people your follow.

You should also make sure that you’re following relevant accounts/people. Are they relevant to your industry? Do they add quality content to your news feed? Get rid of anyone who isn’t relevant or useful.

Create/Update Your Lists

Organise the people you follow into lists. This is an easy way of viewing the updates of key people. Create lists for your customers, partners, suppliers, competitors, industry leaders etc. You may want to make some of these private.

Quality vs Quantity

Now is the time to review what you’re tweeting. It’s not just a numbers game – more isn’t necessarily better. Make sure every single tweet is valuable to those following you and reflects well on your as a business.

Have you any other Twitter resolutions? Leave us a comment below!

We’ve talked about how to use Twitter for business before on the SMEketing online marketing blog, but we thought since we’ve started a new year, we should do a quick refresher post on how you can use it to help grow your business.

How To Use Twitter For Business, Top Tips:

• Make sure your account has been fully set up: Add a proper photo or logo and relevant information. Make sure your profile page is as informative as possible. This is the page that a lot of people will view before following you – so make sure you make a good impression!
• Take your time: Don’t immediately follow every person/account that follows you. Make sure you’re following the right people – people in your industry, competitors, customers, thought leaders. Who you follow says a lot about your online marketing strategy – make sure you’re giving the right message.
• Share valuable information: Sharing links to information which helps promote your product or services is great. But make sure that’s not all you tweet about. Try and make your Twitter feed well rounded – include industry information, customer/service updates, news and advice.
• Be consistent: Make sure you have time to manage your Twitter account. This means replying to any messages or @ replies, conversing on a one to one basis with other users, sharing other users information (retweeting). This must be done on a regular basis for it to have any positive effect. Done correctly and consistently, you’ll be able to create long lasting relationships and create an impression of thought leadership.
• Don’t be negative: As much as you might want to sometimes tell the world about some immoral methods of your competitors, or a poor quality delivery from a supplier, try to resist. What you tweet reflects on you, and it’s always good to take the high-ground. Don’t air your dirty laundry in public!
• Take advantage of the tools available: At SMEketing we love Hootsuite – you can use this to schedule tweets in advance, track any clicks of your shortened links and monitor all messages, @ replies and keywords you make want to track. Another tool we love is TweetDeck.
• Be patient: You’re unlikely to take any orders or make any sales on your first day using Twitter. So be patient and consistent, and you’ll find sooner or later it’s paying off. If your goal isn’t to make sales, you could track things like interaction, visits to your website from Twitter, RTs etc.

Remember, you can follow SMEketing on Twitter: @SMEketing.

If you want more information on how to use Twitter for business please get in touch with us, or visit our social media management information page.

So in no official order, below are the top ten most read blog posts of 2011:

Top Email Marketing Checks To Do Before You Hit Send

Email marketing is a very effective way to communicate with your current and prospect customers. It’s quick, inexpensive and can give you instant results. But it’s important that it’s done right. Make sure you make the most of each eblast by making the following email marketing checks: From Name Is your ‘From’ name recognisable? Will [...]

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Google+ For Business

If you’ve been in a coma recently, you might not have heard about Google’s new social media platform, Google+! Even though it’s been around now for a few weeks, there’s still some confusion over how to use it and what it could mean to you both personally and as a business. The service is Google’s [...]

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Building Your Email Marketing List : Research Results

A couple of months ago, MarketingSherpa released the results of a study they had undertaken, into the most effective methods of growing an email marketing list. The researchers asked more than 1100 marketers to indicate the effectiveness of various methods used within their organisation. This is what they found: Although these results are based on [...]

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Top Black Hat SEO Techniques You Must Avoid

Wikipedia describes black hat SEO as “SEO tactics such as spamdexing, attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines’ terms of service and is often considered unethical SEO.” The alternative is white hat SEO, which are the techniques that are approved by the search engines [...]

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Reciprocal Linking – Good or Bad SEO?

If you’ve got a new website and you’re trying to optimise it and improve it’s position in the search engine results for your desired key terms, you may be aware that link building is an important area of SEO that you need to focus on. So it could be tempting to respond positively to an [...]

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Secrets of Successful Blogging

The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase “we blog” in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999. Ever since then, people have been blogging for business and for [...]

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Top Ten Google AdWord Mistakes – Part Two

Following from our previous post last Thursday, here are the additional five mistakes that we see people make in their Google AdWord Campaigns: 6. Not targetting the right group of searchers: Is your product or services aimed towards a particular demographic or geographical location? Did you know that you can set your AdWord campaigns to target those [...]

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MegaBus Robots.txt File Fail

I am organising a trip up to London with some friends in September. We’ve decided to save some money and use the MegaBus to travel from Southampton. Due to my love of all thing organising, I was put in charge of sorting out the costs etc. So first thing I did was to Google MegaBus. [...]

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Online Promotion: How to promote a new offer, product or service online

Online promotion is a key marketing method for small businesses. If you’re promoting a new offer, product or service, how can you market it online? One of the key benefits of the Internet is that it creates an even platform – allowing smaller businesses to promote themselves at a relatively low cost. But you still need [...]

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Small Business Branding, Logo and Corporate Identity – What’s the Difference?

Okay small business owners, I have some questions for you here: How many of you reading this, know what your logo is? (I’m really hoping you’re nodding along, safe in the knowledge that you know what your logo is! I’ll be scared if  you don’t, unless you’re just starting a new business and haven’t had a [...]

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If you want to start 2012 with a bang, get in touch. We love helping businesses grow through using effective online marketing. So if you want more leads, more sales and more growth in 2012 drop us an email or complete our contact form.

So in no particular order, here are the things we like to do on a daily/every other day or at least once a week…

• Check Google Analytics: Ensure there’s no unusual activity (which can be a good or bad thing!)
• Log into Google and Bing Webmaster Tools: Quick check to ensure there are no crawling errors, jumps in page load speeds, broken links etc
• Check any paid advertising campaigns (such as Google AdWords, Facebook/LinkedIn ads): Review the click through rates (CTR) of keywords and adverts (particularly any new adverts you may be testing), adjust any bids or budgets, add any new negative keywords you may have recently thought of
• Check your presence on social media sites – Twitter, Facebook, Linked, blogs: Review and reply to any mentions, comments etc, engage with other users, make a useful contribution
• Read through any new articles you have loaded in Google Reader: This is a great way to keep up to date on a range of blogs – just add any RSS feeds to Reader and go through it on a daily basis
• Browse through your competitor sites: Are they up to anything new/interesting. A good way to monitor this is to set up Google Alerts with their name, then any new activity from them can either be emailed to you, or added to your Google Reader account
• Have a quick check of the rankings of your major keywords you may be working on: Although rankings do fluctuate on a regular basis and you shouldn’t rely on a small number of keywords, but giving these a quick check can alert you to any issues early on (remember to turn off personalised search!)
• Have a bit of an explore around your website: Check that everything is working as it should, forms are working, links are working etc

Are there any other checks you do on a daily basis? Share your ideas in the comments below.

Google+ Key Features

Circles: You share different things with different people. But sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life.

Sparks: Remember when your Grandpa used to cut articles out of the paper and send them to you? That was nice. That’s kind of what Sparks does: looks for videos and articles it thinks you’ll like, so when you’re free, there’s always something to watch, read, and share. Grandpa would approve.

Hangouts: Bumping into friends while you’re out and about is one of the best parts of going out and about. With Hangouts, the unplanned meet-up comes to the web for the first time. Let buddies know you’re hanging out and see who drops by for a face-to-face-to-face chat. Until we perfect teleportation, it’s the next best thing.

(Taken from http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/)

The key differentiator of Google+ is the ability to segment your friends into different groups. Yes Facebook does already have a group facility, but Google+ really focuses on this as a core part of the platform. Their introduction into Circles video is below (FYI, we feel these videos are a little slow in terms of their tone and content. Normally Google do great videos, this unfortunately isn’t one of them!):

Google+ for Business

So what does Google+ mean for you and your business? Well Google have said that a range of business tools will come online later this year. Google’s product manager Christian Oestlien said:

“Right now we’re very much focused on optimising for the consumer experience, but we have a great team of engineers building a similarly optimised business experience for Google+. It’ll include things like rich analytics and the ability to connect that identity to other parts of Google that businesses might use on a daily basis like AdWords.”

At SMEketing we’re not yet sure how Google+ will incorporate itself into businesses, but we’re thinking that the use of Circles to segment contacts could be a very useful feature, as could the ability to create ‘Hangouts’ (aka conference calls) with specific Circles. The fact that it looks like Google+ might make it easier for business to communicate with their customers could be a key benefit. For many B2B organisations, Facebook has never really took off as a communication and engagement platform, so Google+ could be the filler to fill this gap.

It’ll be very interesting to see what happens with Google+. Certainly it has more media coverage and initial take up than their previous soirees into social media, but whether or not people will start moving from Facebook to Google+ is something we will have to wait a little longer to find out.

If you’re not on Google+ yet, send us an email to info@SMEketing.com and a member of the team will ping you over an invite.

There are two sides to this new little button – the search result side and the content side.

Search Results

Currently this only works if you have activated the +1 in your Google Account (click here to go to the Google Experiment page). Once this is activated, you’ll see little faded +1 buttons next to the search results (and paid results) when you search in Google.com. If you see a result you like you can click the faded button and +1 it.

When you’ve +1?d something, it’ll be shown to people in your Google Network. If your friend Jane is searching for marketing, and they see that you’ve +1?d the Wikipedia result, that’ll be shown to Jane under the result.

Content +1?s

This works in much the same way as the Facebook Like button that you may have seen at the bottom of blog posts. Website owners can add a Google +1 button (get the code here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/) to their content and hope that readers will +1 it (see the +1 we have at the bottom of this post – feel free to click it and +1 us!).

Who is in Your Google Network?

• People in your Gmail & Google Talk chat list
• People in your “My Contacts” group in Google Contacts
• People you follow in Google Reader or Google Buzz

You can manually extend your connections, by linking your Google Profile with other accounts you have online. If you open your Google profile and go to Account Settings. You’ll see an option which says “Connected accounts : View and manage your accounts from other services”. From here you can connect Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Quora etc to your Google Profile – I  believe there are plans to use this to extend your Google Network now that they have rolled out this +1 feature.

What is the point of Google +1

This is a move for Google towards more social search – personalising and improving the results you see based on what people in your network have stated they like. Many say it’s Google trying to make the foundations for their own social network. Many also say they’re trying to copy Facebook and create something similar to Facebook’s Like feature. It’s an interesting development and is something that has a lot of people talking.

This article, Meet +1: Google’s Answer To The Facebook Like Button, by SearchEngineLand was written back in March, but really does cover all angles of this new +1 button. It’s long, but well worth reading if you want to find out more.

12 months ago: Facebook has 350 million active users on global basis.
Now: Facebook officially hit the half-billion member mark last year. According to figures from Socialbakers, there are now some 640m Facebook users worldwide.

12 months ago: 50% of active users log into Facebook each day. This means at least 175m users every 24 hours.
Now: Still citing the 50% active rate, using the official 500m figure, this means at least 250m users every 24 hours. This is more than a 40% increase in 12 months.

12 months ago: 65m users access Facebook through mobile-based devices.
Now: It may well be the year of mobile… For Facebook. Users accessing the site through mobile devices now tops 200m – an enormous 200% increase in around a twelve-month period.

And…

• The average Facebook user creates 90 pieces of content each month
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users
• People on Facebook install 20m applications every day

Fast forward to March 2012 – what do you think will happen to these stats? Will they continue to grow, or will the growth we’ve seen start to plateau? Needless to say, with almost 1 in 12 people globally on Facebook, this isn’t a medium you can afford to ignore anymore.

So how can you take advantage of this medium? Well you can create a Facebook business page, engage with other Facebook users via your own or other pages, or take advantage of their advertising opportunities (see our recent blog post Google AdWords (PPC) vs. Facebook Ads).

We’ll submit your website to 500 social bookmarking sites for just £50. Imagine getting 500 valuable links on high PR websites pointing to your domain… for just £50! That’s just 10p per link!

We’ve probably all had an email like this at some point, but unfortunately sometimes people get lured into the idea of all those wonderful, high quality links and actually follow these spammer up with their offer.

There’s so many things wrong with this offer, it’s hard to know where to start, but I’ll give it a go:

• Firstly, you don’t submit websites to social bookmarking sites, you submit a URL that contains a particular piece of content – so if this company is just submitting your homepage URL, there’s a good chance it will be rejected.
• Most social bookmarking sites use the NoFollow attribute on their links – this means that you don’t get any link juice from the linking site. Some social sites remove this attribute if your content becomes very popular and makes it only the first page, but this takes effort and it’s unlikely that this company will be putting in any extra effort for you.
• It’s unlikely that all 500 social bookmarking sites will relate to you, your product/services or industry. Many of these will be niche sites which won’t even accept your content.
• At the same time as submitting your site to the social bookmarking website, they’ll also be submitting the links of the other poor buggers who fell for this scam – owners and administrators of these sites don’t take too kindly to this kind of activity.
• Many social bookmarking sites don’t offer permanent links – the links stay on the site for as long as the submitting account stays open and active – spammer accounts often open and close quickly, which means your links get deleted too.
• Some of the more popular, influential social bookmarking sites (such as Stumbleupon and Digg) could also ban your domain indefinitely, meaning that when you want to manually submit high quality content on your own time, you’re out of luck!

Social bookmarking isn’t about generating as many links as possible – it’s about sharing high quality content to people who will find it interesting. It’s a social thing and something that takes time. But if done correctly it can have fantastic repercussions for businesses.

So next time an email with an offer like this comes into your Inbox, mark it as spam and forget about it!

If you’re interested in the benefits of creating and promoting high quality content online, get in touch with SMEketing. We love writing copy for the web – blog posts, articles, website copy and more! Call us on 023 8083 7271 or email info@SMEketing.com.

To some extent, Google PPC and Facebook Ads are polar opposites. Google AdWords gives businesses access to audiences with high commercial intent, and enables you to understand their moods and attitudes by trial and error (how often do we go on about the importance of testing, testing and more testing when it comes to Google AdWords?!). You bid for keyword searches that you think will capture consumers surfing around who might be interested in your product, and the Google AdWords interface provides you with the option to bid for different combinations of search terms as frequently as you like.

For example, imagine that you sell used cars in Hampshire. Ideally, you would be able to bid for the search terms: used cars Hampshire, and win the top slot. This is a a combination of keywords like that is likely to have a high asking price. The price of search terms are dictated by the bidding process. Whoever is willing to pay the most, will often win the top slot, and appear at the top of the search in the ‘Ads’ section (although there are other factors, including the relevance of your landing page, the quality and relationship of the other keywords you are bidding on, your click through rate, the quality and relevance of your adverts…)

We refer to users entering search terms like ‘used cars Hampshire,’ as being pretty, ‘far down the cone.’ That is – from the number of possible people in your audience at the top of the cone, where the cone is widest, to the bottom of the cone where it narrows to where people are actually buying your product–people who are entering search terms to search for your product are probably already thinking about buying it. On the other hand, you are only reaching people who are entering the search terms that you’ve bid for.

Facebook Ads, on the other hand, are the opposite of this. You can choose your demographic with incredible precision–based on their ‘likes’–but you’re not necessarily reaching people who are already in the mood for shopping. Does that matter though? The small percentage of people who click on your ad are the only people who matter, and the conversions that you get from that small-percentage can be elaborately fine-tuned as your ad campaign continues.

What is exciting about these marketing tools is the instant level of feedback and data that advertisers have access to. Instead of researching how you should target and launch your ad-campaign through focus-groups or just raw intuition, and then waiting for results with your fingers crossed, with Google AdWords or Facebook Ads, you know exactly how your market is responding straight away, and as such you have the ability to constantly tweak, recalibrate, respond. Advertising along these lines is an art… but it’s also a science. If you watch the campaign diligently and learn how to react to the results, you can hardly fail to make an impact. And by ‘impact,’ we mean, ‘sales.’

If Google AdWords has you in a puzzle, or if Facebook Ads has taken all the fun out of Facebook for you, get in touch! We love nothing more than creating ad campaigns and seeing the conversions (sales, enquiries etc) roll in! Email us on info@SMEketing.com for more information or to arrange a quick coffee to chat it over.