Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Marketing Information System

We are all aware of how critical marketing is to our businesses and to the economy as a whole. But how many of us manage to stay up to date with the latest developments in the field? While it is true that not much has changed in the marketing profession and that it continues to remain the second oldest profession in the world – a title which cannot be taken away from it! But of late, another revolution has been taking over the marketing field. And this revolution goes by the name of a marketing information system.

Over the years, a marketing information system has been known by several identities. A marketing information system has been called an enterprise resource planning system, it has been known as a manufacturing positioning system and in some circles it has also been referred to as the profit increasing system. Whatever the name it is known by, a marketing information system does the same thing. It streamlines the marketing process, provides information that enhances the results and even promotes the brand value of the company.

A basic marketing information system helps the owners of the company (assuming they are the people who buy and deploy it!) do several things. First and foremost, an effective marketing information system helps them plan their marketing activities. This is the most critical stage of marketing and unless the plan is the right one, there can be no hope of gaining any leverage. Next, a good marketing information system helps business owners organize and coordinate their marketing activities. This too is a critical activity and unless the organization and coordination activities are conducted in a professional manner then the marketing initiatives will go haywire. And finally, one of the hallmarks of a good marketing information system is its ability to enable the business owners to decide on the strategy and to control the dissemination of the strategic direction.

Especially in the Internet age, marketing information systems have become especially crucial to better performance of companies. How the management of any given company handles its marketing information is no longer dependent on the capabilities of the personnel at hand, but more on the capabilities of the chosen marketing information system that the company has bought, tested and deployed. Once the system is in place, it does not mean that all decisions are automatic. The marketing information systems available nowadays are capable of intuitively understanding the business requirements and being able to adapt to the changing market and trade scenarios.

Marketing A Business

Whenever anyone starts off a business, one of the first aspects they concentrate on is getting new clients. This is of course, assuming they have the necessary skills to survive in the business in the first place. Once the clients are in, the projects begin. Once the projects begin, the work continues till the money comes in. And the cycle continues till the business finds new clients or the clients themselves finds new places to take care of their business. But among the thousands of businesses I have had the opportunity to see through, very few, if at all, have ever concentrated on marketing a business.

Not many businessmen realize this, but marketing a business is probably one of the most important things they can do to grow their business. A lot of people see getting new clients as marketing a business. Nothing could be further from the truth. Getting new clients is one of the aspects of marketing a business. But marketing a business involves a whole lot more than merely getting hold of clients. Branding is a part of marketing a business. Sales too is part of it. Why, even something as backend oriented as accounting and book keeping is also an integral part of marketing a business.

In fact, marketing a business is all about creating a brand for the business. And branding is serious business. Once a business, any business has a brand, it will begin to gather a reputation. And once it manages to gather a sufficiently large reputation, then clients will flock to it. So why waste time trying to get the clients to come to you when you can play all your cards right, concentrate on your core competency and the clients in turn come to you!

But before one presumes or assumes that marketing a business is easy work, one must realize that nothing again could be further from the truth. Not only is any marketing serious and back breaking business, it is especially so in the case of business. Marketing a business is no easy task. It takes years of assiduous application, a whole lot of patience and constant, consistent and dedicated skill before one can even begin to build a reputation. And the troubles don’t end when a reputation has been built. It needs to be sustained. Only then can anyone reap the benefits. So the next time you entertain the thought of starting your own business, seriously draw up a plan for mating a business. I assure you, you won’t regret it.

Friday, March 28, 2008

Customer relationship marketing

As an expert in customer relationship marketing, I can tell you that it is much more difficult than most people think. Customer marketing, in most people's opinions, is a pretty simple matter. As a consumer, you assume that a company sends out either a flyer, postcard, or a broadsheet almost indiscriminately. They may use radio marketing, television marketing, or anything else. From the consumer's perspective, it may be all the same, but from a business prospective, all of these are radically different approaches. Consumer marketing must be carefully targeted towards the image that the company wants to portray and the clientele that it wishes to attract.

For example, there is a good reason why Auto service centers, doctors offices, and even clothing stores often send out postcards for customer marketing. When you send out a business postcard, you play off of the perception of an intimate relationship between you and the customer. This type of customer marketing is extremely effective because it encourages brand loyalty. Although the consumers, of course, know that it is not a custom-made postcard, it still seems thoughtful. Some companies take customer marketing so far that they send out happy holiday cards to many of their loyal consumers around Christmas.

One of my favorite customer service marketing strategies is to send out targeted advertisements to consumers. This is such an effective form of customer marketing because consumers always appreciate it when you are in tune with their own interests. You can even try to educate about the products while you advertise them, speaking about the relative advantages and disadvantages of each. Usually, people assume that you do not want to ever speak badly of your own products, but sometimes it has its advantages. A few negative details thrown into a customer marketing report can give the customer the perception that you are unusually honest and concerned with the welfare of the consumer.

Of course, this is not the only type of custom marketing that companies routinely engage in. As a matter of fact, the job of a marketing consultants is to come up with new and more innovative strategies to market products. Techniques such as guerrilla marketing and word-of-mouth have revolutionized the marketing industry in the last decade, and customer marketing continues to evolve because of that kind of bright thinking. Not only does it help companies to make more money, but it also helps consumers to receive a product more carefully tailored to their own interests.

E-mail Marketing

E-mail Marketing

My husband has a very unique nickname. Sadly for him, that nickname is also associated with junk e-mail. Many of his friends call him Spam. He got this nickname when we were in college, and that was a long time before e-mail marketing got out of hand, and junk e-mails were dubbed spam. Sadly, everyone still calls him Spam. I quit calling him that a long time ago, but it seems I’m the only one that has let the nickname go.

When the Internet first became popular, e-mail marketing was just in other thing online. If you have an e-mail address now, you know how frustrating this is. There are many different types of e-mail marketing, and the one you probably do not like is the unsolicited form. You probably have a program on your e-mail to get rid of spam, or you have a junk folder so that your e-mail server can filter away the unwanted e-mails before you have to open them.

There are still some companies who use e-mail marketing the correct way. They have mailing lists, and they only send mail out to those who have signed up. It saddens me that many reputable companies have resorted to e-mail marketing that borders on spam. For some reason I am getting e-mails from Avon, and I have never signed up for a mailing list through them. While I hate to click the spam button when I see an e-mail from them in my inbox, I think I’m going to have to do it. I don’t care who the company is they should not be sending me e-mails without my permission. I understand the e-mail marketing is effective, but a good company should never go over to the dark side.

Because the unsolicited e-mail marketing is continuing, I would assume that there are many out there who still click on these e-mails. I am not one of those people. Even if one of them looks interesting to me, I will not click on it to open it. I have been dealing with spam e-mails for long enough to know that clicking on them encourages those were sending you spam to send you more. If I want to get e-mail marketing in my inbox I will sign up for a mailing list. Other than that, I am at least one person in this world who still refuses to click on any unsolicited e-mail no matter what it is trying to sell me. If this type of e-mail marketing were not so successful, it might just go away.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Prospects And Terms For Beginner Online Marketing

When I started the whole internet marketing thing I had a hard time understanding all the different acronyms for the different terms and I had a hard time understanding some of the terms that places like clickbank and other affiliate programs used. I also had a hard time understanding what some of the people in the forums where talking about. So for the people that are in the same boat that I was in this is for you.

EPC-your EPC is your earnings per click. You take the amount you have earned from a program and you divide it by the number of clicks you have received. Say you made $50 in sales and you had 100 clicks. That would mean you are earning about .50 cents a click. This can really help you determine what is selling and what is not.

PPC- Is paid per click. This usually is used for things like ad sense, Yahoo Marketing, Microsoft ad center, and others. It is a way to put ads on search engines, and anywhere they may advertise. The thing is you only pay when someone clicks on your link. With most of the programs you have to bid on key words to get into a targeted market.

CTR-This is the Click through rate. The CTR is the number of times your ad has impressions divided by the clicks. So if your ad had 100 impressions and 2 clicks you would have a CTR of 2%.

EPM- This is your estimated earnings per thousand impressions.

CLICKS- This one is pretty simple it is the number of clicks you have received on your ads, banners, ect.

LEADS- Some advertisers will pay you for leads. A lead is gained usually when someone fills out a survey, or on a dating site for example they sing up for the free service. The company does this because they know once they get the person too sign up for free it will be easier for them to get them to buy and upgrades like a premium membership. Most of the time if the person you referred upgrades you will also get the commission from that.

COMMISION-Simply put this is the amount of money you earn for the sale or lead.

MONETIZING- This is when you add the ads, adsense and whatever else will make you money to your website this is very important to internet marketing.

SEO- Search engine optimization another important part of internet marketing. This involves doing things like article marketing, adding key words and phrases to your site, social bookmaking, back linking, and whatever else you can do to get the word out about your site. You can also blog about your site with a link too it. This will ultimately give you a better ranking on sites like Google which leads to more people coming to your site which also equals more sales.

BACKLINK- Is an incoming link to a website from another website. The number of backlinks you have can help you get a better ranking on search engines such as Google. They will also drive more traffic to your web page when people come across them. To get back links you can write articles about your webpage put a link back to the site at the bottom of the article and submit them to article directories such as www.Ezinearticles.com, you can post a link to your website in your signature in forums, you can post your link for your site to relevant topics in forums, you can also use social book marking to get more backlinks, you can email webmasters of websites relevant to your topic asking if they will put your link on there site. You can create blogs about the topic of your site and put a link in the blog, you can trade links with people and finally you can buy back links to your site.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING- Is a system where people save bookmarks that they like and want to share. Most social book marking site such as digg.com allow people to have friends that they share links with. You can submit your links to your sites and people can vote on them or rate them which in turn gets you more backlinks and more traffic to your site. You can also use recourses like socialmarker.com which will submit your site to a bunch of social book marking sites with ease.

BLOG- A blog is a site where you can post entries articles and videos about whatever your site is about. It is almost like a journal. You can use blogs to get many more people to your website by making sure people keep coming back to your blog. To do this you should add things like videos, an RSS feed, surveys, other fun things you can think of, and constantly update the content. I would use sites like www.squidoo.com and www.blogger.com as they are free and they are very user friendly.

RSS- Really simple syndication is a system that is used in consistently updated blogs or sites. The RSS allows the fans of your blog to know when it has been updated. All they have to do is subscribe to the feed.

META TAGS- Usually keywords written in HTML in the header or the footer of a page. They can not be seen by visitors but they are seen by search engine crawlers and can improve you search engine rank.

NICHE- is a targeted section of the market. Most marketers who make allot of money focus on finding a niche that not many people are selling in. The problem is allot of niches are saturated with sellers. Such as the acne niche. However a niche such as say ornamental garden stones may not be as saturated and you now have a better chance of making a highly ranked site about the stones and you have a better chance of selling them.

Success Factors For Beginner Online Marketing

As an internet marketing beginner, there a number of things that you need to master just to really break into internet marketing, let alone start to make money, regardless of what all the get rich quick artists might try to tell you.

These days, more and more people are starting online businesses. That is both good news and bad for you as you gear up to wade into the online business fray. The good news is, the popularity of online businesses is a testament to the way people do business these days – an increasing number of people are becoming web savvy, and the are turning to online sources for doing business. The bad news is, with the proliferation of online businesses of all stripes, it can be difficult to both get the word out about your business. Further, it can be difficult to set your business apart from the competition. Just as with planning to launch a “real-world” business, gearing up to start an online business requires a good deal of planning and forethought. But, with a few strategies in your arsenal, you should soon be doing business!

The first thing you need to decide is your domain name. While there are a host of reasons for carefully considering this choice, they all boil down to one thing: marketability. Choose a domain name that is catchy, easy to remember, and relevant to your business. Don’t use hyphens in your domain name, and don’t be generic. Flowers.com isn’t specific enough for someone looking to purchase flowers in a certain region (unless you deliver worldwide, in which case geography isn’t a factor).

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Marketing Online With Well Written Articles

If you think it's easy to get a visitor to search for your website, find it, read it (meticulously) and bookmark it, well - you're deluded. The majority of web hits these days (they don't call it visits anymore) occur through search engine crawlers - leaving alone the ones that are referred from somewhere else (usually costs money) or if your friends and family trying their best to promote you through chain mail. The question is - how do you get the attention of the search engines?

Of the several methods purported to work well in garnering web crawler attention, putting up small, snappy articles crafted specifically for the search engines using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques is the most cost-effective and intuitively simple way to do so. Needless to say, your website must convey the impression to the reader that they are actually getting something they need or enjoy out of their time visiting you (an important principle for first dates too)!

SEO "crawlers" can be a website's best friend, or worst enemy. If your business site contains irrelevant content or hard to digest information, then no matter how well you have optimized your key words for the search engines, your page ranking will drop faster than it rises. After all, its humans who read it, not machines. SEO must go had in hand with good, well-structured content. If you do not write well it is essential that you learn to do so or hire someone to write for you. When the crawler comes across the keywords in the content, and brings up your site, the content on that particular page must be related to the keywords you have filled it with.

For good keyword optimization, one of the tools to consider here is "keyword density." This is helpful to have the main keywords show up enough times to be catch a crawler's attention, but low enough to maintain readability: not to read like ''The Eagles of California have seen a sharp rise in their California Eagles fan base, despite the fact that eagles in recent years have become fewer around California" (real-life now defunct example, passed into web lore). Most keyword densities should reside between 3 to 5 % - any higher and you risk being rejected as a spammer. Some sites will still raise this percentage (greedily) in order to get more hits, but the content can be insufferable to read and will turn off your visitors.

A bit of history now as to why working with very high keyword densities can make it difficult for a site is that some search engines actually blacklist sites with unreasonably high keywords. Google's folks, amongst their many pioneering inventions, started using this technique with their crawlers to filter out spammers above the 5 % threshold. In today's Internet marketing, a savvy copywriter should maintain a nice balance between flow and skilled use of keywords. Many copywriters have started using "secondary" keywords. These, specially placed within the context, increase the number of hits for a page. This technique becomes useful in that the copywriter has more breathing space to work - and provide infotainment.

More and more potential customers are getting online to do their own research before any purchase, and websites have become more than just marketing tools. It's your electronic 'showroom' so to speak, and the more well-planned, elegant and informative articles you produce that have the right balance of keyword density, the higher your chance for retaining and even repeating business.

Online Marketing Through Search Engines

The search engines are one of the major drivers of traffic to any website. It provides tremendous exposure to your website in return generating valuable traffic. Most web developers have realized the potential of these search engines in effective search engine marketing techniques pretty well, and are making optimum use of advertising and promoting their website through the search engine promotional campaigns.

These days the search engines are the main source for the web surfers to find anything useful in the web. All they need to do is type a relevant keyword in the search engines, and check out the related sites that appear in their listings. Thus, the main motive of all SEO marketing techniques is to attain the top ranking on these search result listing pages.

The search engines generally have two different kinds of search procedures the Organic and the paid search listing. In order to attain the best results from your search engine marketing it is essential that you utilize both of these in order to completely optimize your website. Keyword optimization is the buzz word in SEO marketing. It is very necessary to optimize your website for the primary and secondary keywords relevant to your site. In case you have a specifically long keyword which is otherwise not optimized on the search engines, make sure to use the paid listing technique to optimize them.

The search engines marketing are helpful in giving you the best results only if your website too possesses high quality content. If your website is not that useful to the users they would not come to your site anyways, and then no search engine will be able to improve your website rankings. People visit a website with a purpose, and if their purpose is not served they will not visit your website. It is also necessary to keep updating your website content regularly so that the visitors find something new every time they make a visit. This will create a good impact on your visitors and they will frequently visit your website for the latest content.

Along with keyword optimization and pay per click campaigns, directory submissions are another essential and effective SEO marketing. Providing your website's URL at different web directories and other online directories also helps in pulling effective traffic to your website.

While you are effectively taking all the necessary steps to ensure a good SEO marketing for your website, it also equally important to do a thorough analysis of your search engine marketing outputs. This will give you a fair idea about how the search engine is responding to all your efforts and also shall help you better your efforts in future.