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In today’s marketplace, the Internet has become a key component in business success – whether you are a retailer involved in high-volume ecommerce, a service company seeking clients on a smaller scale or even a non-profit trying to distribute information to groups in your area.

admin — Fri, 21 May 2010 13:14:38 +0000

In today’s marketplace, the Internet has become a key component in business success – whether you are a retailer involved in high-volume ecommerce, a service company seeking clients on a smaller scale or even a non-profit trying to distribute information to groups in your area. Competition is fierce. It is important to make your voice heard!

Luckily, the Internet has many advantages. Perhaps the most important – your target audience is actively seeking you, right now! Can they find you?

We provide the resources you need to succeed in building your online presence. With services including website analysis and consultation, search engine optimization, link building and online PR to name a few, I will work with you to create an Internet marketing plan for your business that will meet your individual needs.

Something to think about when pondering about a website if your new website generates one sale, you could make back the money you spent on getting your website up and running. Also, today’s competitive market dictates that a prospective client might see your company as behind the times or unable to compete if you do not already have a website by now. I’ve seen many companies that greatly benefit once they are able to take quotations and orders online. Let us also not forget that your competition has full access to the web, why shouldn’t you?

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You’ve heard the phrase… Freedom isn’t free. Love isn’t free either. Both take time, physical resources and an emotional investment. Social Media Marketing isn’t free either.

admin — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:22:21 +0000

You’ve heard the phrase… Freedom isn’t free. Love isn’t free either. Both take time, physical resources and an emotional investment. Social Media Marketing isn’t free either. Just because there is no cash exchange doesn’t mean it doesn’t cost you to participate in Social Media Marketing.

Assume you make $100 per hour. Assume you spend 5 hours online a week investing in the conversation. That’s $2000 a month you are spending. Are you making that money back? Yes, it takes time to build a community…Yes, it takes time to listen, learn, be involved with the people you want to reach…But if you don’t have a plan, if you don’t have goals… if you are not measuring your cost, you have no idea if any of it is working! Plan, Set Goals, Track, Rinse and repeat. What say you? If you need help making a plan, e-mail me today tom@marketinge2.com

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Normally, the worst reason for doing anything is “because everyone else is…”However, if you’re marketing a product or service and you are NOT advertising where your competition is, you’ll find yourself left behind very suddenly.

admin — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:16:47 +0000

Normally, the worst reason for doing anything is “because everyone else is…”However, if you’re marketing a product or service and you are NOT advertising where your competition is, you’ll find yourself left behind very suddenly.

In the past, when your customers were looking for a product or service, their easiest option would be to pull out the Yellow Pages to search for a store or company in their area that provided the product or service they were in need of. Sometimes this supplied a name and phone number. Sometimes, an address. On more rare occasions, a picture advertisement with a list of services or products.

With the Internet today, that same customer can go to a search engine or index and be presented with a list of businesses that fit their needs, with links to their web pages. Those web pages are loaded with product pictures and price lists, maps and phone numbers, and even online Shopping Cart system which allows the customer to order products and services–all without ever having to leave the house or office. Perhaps you have a “service” oriented practice such as accounting, law, or medicine that’s already doing well and you’re wondering why you should burden yourself with the added expense of a Web site. Simply put, not having a web site will soon be like not having a listing in your local Yellow Pages.

In the Web world, this is referred to as a “corporate presence.” Even if your best business comes by word-of-mouth, your potential customers may want to check you out. A well-designed, professional web site can give you added visibility and credibility. Especially if you provide a public service and your goal is to get information to a large number of people almost instantaneously. Additionally, the cost of maintaining a Web site is probably the most cost effective advertising you’ll ever do.

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Why is it some people think that the town they live in is so vastly different from the rest of the world, or why they think that anything new is not for them.

admin — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:48:26 +0000

Why is it some people think that the town they live in is so vastly different from the rest of the world, or why they think that anything new is not for them. While Social Media surges forward connecting people around the world, and gathering essential marketing data on its users, most business owners are eager to capitalize on this growing feature of the global, commercial landscape.A rush is on. Experts are appearing from every corner of the marketing world. “Instant results on Google anyone?”

Quick and easy solutions are a red flag and should be greeted with skepticism by business owners and web managers. Attempting quick and easy methods to “trick” Google, Yahoo and Bing to rank your site well can result in a world of pain. You can shell-out to get found online, and found out that you are invisible online, or in some cases – blacklisted online. There are rules on the web. Break them, and the search engines will punish you. Following search engine rules and doing it well will get you found for your key search phrases. Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) require technical know-how and marketing know-how. Starting out with a SEO or SEM campaign can be confusing. Some basics items should be put in place first to set the foundation for future success. A website that is properly design and programmed is a the start. You then need a plan to connecting your company to your customers. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Blogs. The can serve your company well, or chew up vital resources without much return. To avoid wasting money on your organic SEO campaign, you need an experienced web marketing and development team. An understanding of the technology, current trends and business processes are critical elements to your web marketing strategy. Discussing these items with your SEO team will reveal information to help you illuminate the way forward. Building a website and launching a web marketing campaign requires a expert developer as well as an expert salesman.

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Savannah Ga may be small compared to say New York City, but your website doesn’t know that.

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:37:39 +0000

Amazing fact: The United States alone accounts for 9.5 billion Internet searches every month.

Pointed question: What do prospects discover when they google you?

If the results amount to anything short of a strong Web presence, you should begin crafting one right away. Simply put, businesses need to market themselves online — or be eaten by the competition.

Internet marketing starts with a professional, effective website. If you’re a business without a site, wake up and embrace the wonders of the World Wide Web. Beyond the basic site, your plan of action might focus, too, on a host of ever-evolving high tech tools, such as a blog, audio podcasts, video clips, social-networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), paid advertising on others’ sites.

Online marketing is no hula hoop fad: The medium is here to stay — and growing more sophisticated with every new cyberspace advancement.You’re building confidence by moving the user step by step. If you don’t motivate people to move on to the next level in the process — to contact your business your website hasn’t done its job.

Right now is a critical time to create online tools for keeping in touch with customers on an ongoing basis. The web allows them to personalize communications in a mass way. If you’re not creating a presence that will be picked up, you’ll be at a major disadvantage — and maybe not even know it.

In the Internet’s first phase, websites were stagnant informational sites that told the users about you but didn’t really involve the business owner interacting. To really wow people today, you need to provide much more sophisticated interactivity — a new phase referred to as Web 2.0, which is distinguished by user-created content. Examples include blogging, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter.

With Web 2.0, the main goal is to start an interaction. Twitter, the social-networking sensation, lets those who sign up to receive other folks’ feeds read short — 140 characters or less — messages called tweets. The object is to stay connected by answering Twitter’s key question, “What are you doing?” But plenty of celebrities, businesses and politicians have latched onto Twitter for marketing and promotional use.

What’s neat is that most of these newer online services can be interconnected. For instance, your business profile on LinkedIn can be tagged back to your website. There, you might have a link to your blog, where you can elaborate on the brief tweets you post on Twitter. If you’re involved in community activities or enjoy strategic partnerships, you can cross-link with those sites too.

Web 2.0 services position you as a savvy business person, it’s also a way to be novel and to have reason for people to want to interact with you and start a dialogue.”

The secret to having the website accomplish something for you is to make it personal and interactive, it’s not enough to simply post your standard sales pitch and brochure… Make [the site] engaging and easy for people to navigate so it becomes a very fluid instrument for research.

Online marketing is a surprisingly cost-efficient way to connect with clients and prospects. The cost-benefit trade-off is usually pretty good.

Customized websites, which, depending on needs, can cost several thousand dollars, make your special qualifications and unique value proposition stand out, as well as allow enhanced interactivity.The biggest negative is to have a generic website, There are so many cookie-cutter sites out there that…all look the same. They aren’t customized in communicating who you are, what you do and why somebody should be a client.”

To drive visitors to your site, ideally it should emerge high in search engine results when a prospect types in, for example, “your business” and your locale. The process called search engine optimization (SEO) can help affect that. Websites have to be coded and worked so they will give you high organic rankings in a search.

It’s not a simple matter, though. Each engine has its own variables that determine which results turn up at the top. Moreover, the variables are always changing. And though you may show up high in Google results, that may not be the case in a Yahoo search or a Bing Search.

Websites, social networking, e-mail and other technologies will keep on merging. here’s no doubt that [Web marketing] will be increasingly important for maintaining client relationships.

If businesses don’t have a site, they’ll be at a disadvantage — and that has been true for at least five years. They may be in denial that a website is important; but it’s essential.

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If you are Marketing your business with out a strong internet presence than you are committing marketing suicide. If that describes you. than we need to discuss SEO.

admin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:16:07 +0000

I have lived in Savannah since 1989 and I have heard the phrase “In Savannah it’s all who you know” To a certain extent this is true but in a town with an Army base as well as two large higher education institutions. If you are Marketing your business with out a strong internet presence than you are committing marketing suicide. If that describes you. than we need to discuss SEO.

With today’s technology driven society, having a website for your business is a necessity. Customers demand that they can find a business to solve their requirements when searching the Internet, but simply just owning a website is not sufficient. You need to expose it to your potential customers so they can find you when searching. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the best way to accomplish this.

A well-designed SEO site provides you with the possibility to rank on page one of the search engines, expose your business to prospective clients, guide targeted web traffic to your site, escalate your home business leads and ultimately build a quality home business lead list. The higher your site ranks, the more likely customers will click on it. Consequently, your intentions should be to rank as high as possible.

Now you can say you know someone in the SEO business.Feel free to email me to setup a free consultation on how I can help your business on the web.

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Old Savannah Business Myth: My Website Is Not Critical To My Business.

admin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:04:18 +0000

Many small business owners fall prey to this myth after having a website for several years without seeing any measurable results. Unfortunately, this conclusion grows out of a misunderstanding of how to use the website as part of the overall strategy to grow the business. As the small business owner fails to see results from their website they begin to allocate fewer dollars to improve and promote it. As time goes on, the website becomes completely out of date and no longer represents the company it was originally built to serve. The reality is that many companies, particularly small businesses are achieving great success on the web. The key is to define the purpose of the website and how this will fit into the overall sales strategy for your business.

Is the objective of your website to sell products online? Perhaps it is but, most likely for small businesses, this is not the case. Perhaps the best objective for your small business website is to answer the key questions and objections that are common among your prospective customers.

For example, if you are a small business that advertises in the community, prospective customers may want to visit your website before they call to invite you to quote their project. For many small businesses it may be appropriate to design the website solely for the purpose of providing validation of your company by answering the key questions that are common to your customers. Your website can help you establish credibility and trust with your customers and prepare them to take that final step to become a new customer.

So the first step is to consider how your website will fit into your overall business strategy. Look at your competitors, look at companies that follow a similar business model, talk to your customers about their experience with companies that are using the web effectively. Don’t give up on the idea that your website can be an effective element to help you achieve your overall business strategy until you have taken the time to research, consider and experiment with different techniques to use the web for maximum business growth.

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It’s no secret that we live in rapidly changing times. The marketing industry and those serving it (ad agencies, market researchers, media outlets etc) are running just to keep still, constantly seeking guidance or reassurance about what’s looming and how to manage it.

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:42:53 +0000

It’s no secret that we live in rapidly changing times. The marketing industry and those serving it (ad agencies, market researchers, media outlets etc) are running just to keep still, constantly seeking guidance or reassurance about what’s looming and how to manage it.

In some ways, the very explosion in information and connectivity we are seeing is a help as much as a challenge – marketers tracking the rapid changes occurring within their industry have an unprecedented quantity of information and opinion to draw on. The advice and guidance that exists from industry commentators is phenomenal.

Unfortunately the very nature of most such commentators creates a serious problem in itself, in that most of them understandably comment on their own area of expertise such as social media, search marketing and direct marketing.

In a classic case of “not seeing the wood for the trees”, it’s easy enough for marketers to believe they are keeping abreast with matters while failing to note the monumental changes we are living within.

Those missing the bigger issues at stake are the commentators and practitioners using phrases such as “sell to”, “communicate to”, or “market to” – all terms that convey an “us and them” mentality of the traditional marketer, a salesperson who deals with a mass audience via one-way communications. Without an eye on the big picture, people like this will suffer.

For what we are witnessing is the biggest shift in culture since the Gutenberg press. This is not an overstatement of the importance of social media, for one must bear in mind the term “media” encompasses all communications between people, and as such, changes in media invoke changes in broader culture and society (not for good reason is media control often the first act of dictators).

Until the advent of social media, media developments have only differed by technology. From cave paintings to Web 1.0, all that truly changed was cost, scale, timeliness and cosmetic enhancements. Most media essentially involved the thoughts of a few being distributed to the many.

The internet may have opened up an unparalleled amount of information to the world, but until social media evolved, a web browser was simply a combination library, shop and entertainment zone. Most chat rooms were restricted to clunky linear conversation threads open to the public – like Speakers Corner in Hyde Park: social, yes; sociable, no.

In contrast to the media landscape of the past, and the (falling) barriers of cost and physical access aside, almost everything that makes us human is now free of the traditional restrictions of time, space, editorial and political control. Traditionally separate media formats such as radio, television and newspapers exist as they do only for historical and / or technical reasons, and these reasons are increasingly difficult to justify (content from the Herald itself can now be accessed in eight formats).

Convergence will continue until everything in our lives not conducted face-to-face will occur through a single two-way transmitting device with assorted plug-ins for the physical needs of the user (eg, large-screen TV viewing, bath-friendly digital books). Everyone and everything is well down the track of being accessible to everyone and everything else.

The traditional delineation between content providers, advertisers, researchers, sellers and buyers will blur into a flat hierarchy of equally accessible interactions. What we are now developing isn’t so much Web 2.0 but Society 2.0. We’ve seen how democracy and free information flows can undermine dictatorships; the same applies to the traditional top-down marketing pyramid.

What does this means for marketers? In some ways much will remain unchanged – many people will still opt for advertising-funded passive media like TV and live, localised radio, and it’s unlikely that we’ll see products such as cat litter being heavily discussed within social media (although even the cat litter manufacturers will have to supplement their 0800 customer lines with social media interfaces).

But the big mindset change required is for marketers to stop thinking like one-to-many salespeople, transforming their brand-customer interactions into quality one-to-one experiences.

Consider the best salespeople and what sets them apart – they listen closely to their customers, engaging them in active, two-way discussions. As a result of this truly interactive conversation they determine how to present their wares in such a way that not only will their customers buy, but they will enjoy the process and feel no regret about their purchase.

In contrast, marketers communicating to a mass audience using traditional mass-market media (the loudhailer approach) have been unable to conduct such high-quality two-way communications, hence the enormous investments made in advertising pre-testing.

Marketers now have to understand that not only are their brands, services and products no longer just part of a marketplace but that they are actually part of a society. Brand managers are used to personifying their brands and imbuing them with personality, so now’s the time those personalities have to come alive, communicating with people as equals, not walking, talking wallets. Marketers used to operating large call centres will be used to the management practices required – the same now needs to be applied to the digital space. Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate this is to imagine the old model as hundreds of marketers on a stage, all trying to out-perform each other in presenting their sales pitch to the millions of consumers in the audience.

Today, marketers have to picture themselves off the stage, in the audience, accessible to all via equal, two-way interactions. In contrast, “doing a Facebook campaign” merely means taking the mass-market loudhailer to the social media space rather than joining the community.

For marketers struggling to change the “us and them” mindsets that they, their colleagues or agencies may cling to, try this approach – think of (and talk to) your customers as the real people that they are, not anonymous groups of consumers.

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Music Industry Marketing Lessons

admin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:10:59 +0000

As much as I love movies, when I am asked the question “if you were
stuck on a deserted island, what movies would you take?” I ask if I can
take music instead. The best relaxation I get is when I am listening to
great music on headphones. The funny thing is, I’ve been doing this for
as long as I can remember. My parents raised me with music. It was
always playing in our home. I got to know Bruce, Elton, a great band
from Boston named… well, Boston.
There is a great digital music timeline at

http://www.dilanchian.com.au/ip-tech-e-biz/digital-music-technology-and-…

which, as I read, brought back a lot of my own memories about how my
music has evolved right under my nose. My parents had vinyl, the old
standard, but I was a child of the Sony Walkman. I had the yellow
water-resistant, supposedly unbreakable (later found to be untrue)
version. The cassette was supposed to ruin music’s ability to make
money because you could copy it. Does this sound similar to the cries
that downloadable musics would kill the recording industry?
In 1986, I got my first cd player. I was told it was a miracle disk
that would never degrade and never skip. This was later proven to be
untrue. The disks skip and the lyrics are tiny. Records skipped too but
at least I could read the lyrics.
CDs stayed the standard in my life for about a decade until I got my
first computer. That’s when I discovered the Internet. The Internet
changed the way music was presented as well as distributed. Napster was
really the start of it and it is funny to think of how much bands like
Metallica and The Beatles fought the revolution of digital music
distribution. Ironically both of these bands have since embraced
internet marketing.

In 2001 the same year Napster’s website went black,
Apple introduced the Ipod and the I Tunes store and the response was
enough for Microsoft to follow suit two years later with the release of
the Zune. Apple not to be outdone followed the Ipod up with the I Phone
which does audio as well as video.
The lessons that groups in the music industry have learned (and are
still learning) are good examples for the rest of us. Every one of the
technological advances have benefited those who took advantage of them,
while the ones who were kicking and screaming got left behind. The same
is true for Online marketing for small businesses. The ones who embrace
the Internet will flourish, while the ones who discount it as “useless”
will get left in the dust. If you need help or don’t know where to
start, contact us today.

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If your company strives for quality, this should be expressed as much by your website as it is with your company’s products and services.

admin — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:41:16 +0000

If your company strives for quality, this should be expressed as much by your website as it is with your company’s products and services. From now on, consider your website as an extension of those products and services; consider it as your company online presence. Ask yourself what is important to you and your customers when it comes to the services or products your company provides? Is it the advantages like quality, performance, presentation and reliability that are offered? Does your current web site reflect this? Revisit your company’s mission statement – is this also reflected in the website?

It’s amazing how many companies do not have a professional online presence for fear of expense (in which case, they often opt for a “do-it-yourself” product). A well-developed, well-designed website is not a cost; it’s an investment, and any related expenses will convert into new clients. At present, there are several reputable organizations that will help your company build an effective web site for a reasonable price.

It is proven that R.O.I is quickly met when the website properly addresses your requirements and /or target market. Keep in mind that your website is the least expensive 24/7 (worldwide) salesman that you will ever find.

It’s important to find a team of website design experts who will listen to you, understand your needs, and not only follow your guidelines, but also present you with new options and suggestions to increase your sales and customer acquisition. A good team will produce a professional online presence that is in tune with your company’s image, excels in usability and is search-engine friendly.

Online marketing for your website is also very important since your utmost goal is to attract users that search for the products or services you offer. A high-quality website that is lost among search engines is like placing an expensive ad in a magazine that nobody buys. If Web browsers cannot find your site, they are limited in how they can purchase your product or service. Treat your we site as a marketing tool, not only as a source for company information.

Summary: A professional online presence and a quality website are the most important investments you will make for your company; it will reflect your company’s image, and the products and services you offer. Seek a website design company that is willing to learn about your company, and its products and services. Get involved in the website development process and offer your opinion and suggestions – after all, you know your market and your company.