Perhaps the biggest argument against social media is how time consuming it can be.

Can you relate to questions like these: “Who has that kind of time?” or “When am I supposed to do all of this?”

To be totally honest with you, social media does require some of your time. It may very well qualify as being the greatest of hidden costs when promoting your business online. Many of us could end up losing a lot of valuable time if we don’t exercise some care.

It’s good to have a clear agenda when setting out, and to keep close tabs on how your time is being spent. The following list will give you five ideas on how to work towards your goals.

#1: Keep Your Goals In Sight

Social Media is full of opportunities to become distracted. Chatting, games, and endless content can all give us the illusion of accomplishment without actually getting anything done. Interacting with social media can be useful, but much interaction is potentially a waste of time, so it’s important that you are able to tell the difference.

For a point of reference, try to imagine a company party or other event. How do you spend your time at those sorts of functions? Do you socialize with one or two people about mundane things or do you try to distribute your attention more evenly and strike up conversation with new contacts? Are you there because you have nothing better to do, or is it because you are representing yourself as a professional and utilizing the opportunity to network?

It’s necessary to have a plan and also know a good means by which to measure your success.

You might be wondering how this helps you find extra time? The majority of companies already budget their time spent on marketing, PR and research. If you are confident that your efforts spent on social media fall into one of these groupings, and will be equally or more effective than other efforts towards these projects, then you actually already have a grasp on how to divide up the time you should spend using social media as an alternative to your current methods.

#2: Use Social Media in Areas Where it is More Efficient for You

What if you could say, “Due to the work I’ve invested in social media, I have eliminated having to make pitches, compose proposals or attend sales meetings. I never place cold-calls for my business, nor do I bother with competitive bids.”

Think about all the time you would suddenly end up with if you were spared having to pursue leads and sales closings!

My last job in Sports Marketing would sometimes require me to be in a car for three to six hours in order to attend a half hour sales presentation up against other companies competing against us. Even more important than how unbearable it was, it simply did not work very well.

Realistically, I am not trying to convince you that it’s possible to use social media as a replacement for your current business practices in all circumstances. I don’t believe it’s a smart choice to rely solely upon it, even if it could be done. What I do believe is that it will be worth your time to set aside a couple hours each work week to explore what social media has to offer and test it out. You will find that it may be a great tool in combination with other techniques, and can work smoothly within a greater business model.

A great benefit of social media is the accessibility of it and freedom of choosing when to use it.

#3: Take Advantage of Slow Times

Do you spend a good amount of time simply waiting? I recently attended a conference in Nashville and between travel time and staying alone at my hotel, I put it all towards social media. If you travel for business, how much of each trip do you spend actually doing business? Now, how much of the time are you…

On a plane?
In a cab?
Waiting in line?
In an airport?
Dining out?
Meetings?
At a hotel?

As long as you are equipped with a device that you can connect to the internet through, you have all that is needed to turn some of this down time into something somewhat productive, like adding an update or interacting with people online. Even if you don’t get as much done, staying connected to others will be refreshing.

Ask yourself how much time goes into checking your messages and posting a tweet or status update? Or maybe to investigate a link or answer a simple inquiry? It’s no more than a few minutes, is it?

You will be surprised if you take an inventory throughout the day of how often you get as much as 10 minutes at a time where you are on hold for some reason.

When I’m at my desk, I still oftentimes am waiting, whether it’s for the PC to boot up, a print job, renders or uploaded files. Those are some of the best moments to take a peek at your social media profiles!

Thinking in these terms, what could be accomplished with MORE than only these few minutes a day?

#4: Change Your Surroundings, Create Future Content and Focus on Structure

Whenever you find yourself with an open block of time, spend an hour of that time expending your maximum level of effort on generating content. Some great ways of doing this could include:

Creating an outline and compose a series of blog topic entries to post at a later date when you won’t have the time to write them.

Experiment with your ideas, visualize them with mind mapping tools, form headlines and lay it all out in a way that you can later reference.

Think ahead by adding important events to your calendar, make a list of contacts who you would like to touch base with, whether they are prospective contacts or ones you’ve fallen out of touch with.

Organize and increase efficiency for the next week by sorting tasks and filing messages.

Make a week’s worth of tweets that will spark interest, which will mean only having to check in and respond every day.

One of my friends in Georgia visits an internet cafe a couple times each week for a change of “scenery”. On these visits he spends a few distraction-free hours doing all of his scheduling and content creation for the following week. Sometimes an environment outside of the office allows for more concentration and you will end up with higher quality work in a relatively short period of time.

#5: Try Not to Stress Out

The last point I will make is that none of this should feel like a chore. No one will penalize you or judge how well you are doing. The idea behind it all is to make use of a great resource and ideally to enjoy yourself while you accomplish this.

Luckily, most people will not demand perfection if you are sure to offer your best assistance, and if you’ve built a strong reputation by providing great value. With these things all in place, you will have some room for mistakes.

Don’t panic if you haven’t posted an article on any given day. Your followers on Twitter may begin to wonder if you disappear for several days at a time, but being too busy to tweet on some days will hardly cost you anything.

Personally, I use social media in a very social fashion. It takes the place of a coffee break in my day. While I do manage to use social media very effectively for work, I also appreciate the real people behind those avatars as well. Do your best not to approach social media as an obligation, but instead place more importance on developing relationships within it. A mindset like this is optimal for greater success!

What are your thoughts? Is it a challenge for you to find time? How do you fit social media into your daily schedule? Feel free to tell us in your comments below…

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Marketing with Facebook has quickly become one of the best ways to reach a target audience. With Facebook, you can do many fantastic things for your marketing campaign. Here are 5 tips to keep in mind when marketing using Facebook.

1. Choose Your Target Audience
One of the most important things to keep in mind when you start marketing with Facebook is that you need to zero in on a target audience. Facebook allows you to choose exactly which demographic you want to market to. Therefore, you need to make sure that you take advantage of this feature and select a target market. Depending on what your product is, your target market could vary greatly. Therefore, you need to sit down and determine exactly who you want to see your message and who is the most likely to purchase your product. This can help you avoid wasting money on ads to people outside of your target market.

2. Be Consistent
When you are constructing your ads for marketing with Facebook, you need to make sure that you are consistent with your message. No one likes to click on an ad that they believe to be about one topic and then get to a website that has nothing to do with what they clicked on. This will anger your customers and end up costing you money in the long run. Make sure to be consistent with your message throughout the process and it will pay big dividends.

3. Don’t Blow Your Budget
With Facebook marketing, you can potentially spend a lot of money bringing people to your website. You need to make sure that you set up a daily and weekly budget that you want to stick to. Otherwise, you could easily go over your marketing budget in a short amount of time.

4. Know Your Purpose
Marketing with Facebook is a very powerful tool that can help you bring in massive amounts of traffic to your website. However, if you do not know what you are going to do with the traffic once you get it to your website, there is not much point in getting it. You need to focus on developing your website and making sure that it converts a good percentage of traffic first. Until you have a high conversion rate on your website, there is no point in paying for traffic yet.

5. Get Attention Without Annoying Tricks
When you are constructing your ads for Facebook marketing, you want to make sure that you are going to get the attention of your target audience. However, you do not want to use annoying techniques in order to bring people in. Many people are starting to become accustomed to these over-the-top ads on Facebook. Generally, most people are now ignoring them. Therefore, you have to carefully craft your ad so that it does not turn off your target audience. Think of the people that will be looking at your ad as intelligent individuals. Do not try to dumb it down too much.

You can do this on your own, but you might also want to hire a professional. After all, it is still marketing and you need to make sure you keep to your branding and positioning as you would in all media.

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The Internet has become an integral part of the modern business world. Companies of all sizes and industries are using the Internet to promote their products and services and interact with their customers. Being on the Web goes far beyond having a website. We must speak the language properly, use the resources available, aggregate content and maximize value to customer relationships, leveraging new business.

Currently there are millions of people doing searches on the Internet, where many of them seek specific services and products, which may be what you are selling.

The process to position your website on top of search engines results pages (SERPs) is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

A Search Engine Optimization is a powerful digital marketing tool and has gained much importance in recent times and it has grown very rapidly.

And you might ask : “is SEO different from search engine marketing (SEM)?”

And :”What is best for my business?”

SEO is part of  search engine marketing, but SEO is purely involved in making web pages rank high in organic searches. SEM includes other marketing programs like buying banners, links etc.

Search Engine Marketing – SEM

SEM or simply Search marketing is the area responsible for online marketing strategies and techniques involved in generating and increasing traffic from search engines, as well as promotion and brand awareness in the same results. SEO and PPC are different areas of SEM.

Search Engine Optimization – SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is nothing more than a set of techniques implemented in and out of your site that aims to enhance the presence of a site in the organic search results.

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Building targeted traffic to your business website is important to ensure that your online presence is effective and your website is working for you. We all know that building targeted traffic to your site takes work. Many businesses use proven Internet marketing techniques such as Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure that their potential customers are finding their site over their competition. Investing in Internet marketing to build a client base is a wise decision, but of course requires a financial investment to get started. As a small to medium sized business (SME), you want to be sure that your investment is used wisely.

After all it costs 8x as much to get a new customer than it does to retain an existing one.

So if you have attracted visitors to your website through Internet marketing and have converted these visitors into customers, you want to be sure you retain those customers Building a relationship with a customer can mean repeat business with them, and if they are satisfied with dealing with your business, they are more likely to refer you to friends. If you have already gone to the effort and expense of establishing a customer base through your business website, you want to encourage them to return to your site and do business with your company again.

What will keep my customers coming back to my site?

The biggest question you need to ask yourself is why would customers want to return to my site. Once they have seen your website, its features and content and have learned about your business, what reason can you give them to visit you online again.

What’s on your site that your customers want?. Too many businesses set up their websites with the intention of telling visitors what they want – not necessarily what their visitors want, and walk away from it. They treat their website like a static brochure and never update it. These business owners are missing out on a great opportunity to market themselves.  The beauty of websites is that they are dynamic and can be updated easily. If your site never changes and does not contain content that interests your customers, they wont see any need to return to it.

So, change it up. Do some research on what your customers want from your website, and do your best to give it to them.

• If they want more information from your site, you could give it to them in the form of industry-related articles and white papers that you refresh regularly.  If they come to know you as an expert, they are more likely to return to your site for information.

• If they want promotions and discounts, offer some that are only valid for website visitors. As repeat visitors, they deserve to be treated as though they are valued and important – because they are. By updating your promotions and discounts monthly, you give visitors a reason to return to your site to see what’s new.

• If they want testimonials from existing clients (which they most likely do), be sure to update your testimonial section often. Testimonials give you credibility in your local market, so be sure to collect testimonials from your customers and add them to your website in a timely fashion. Encourage your existing customers to return to your site to see their name showcased there.

How will they know that I have updated my website?

You cannot just expect your customers to keep your website at the top of their minds and return often. You have to keep them informed of news and changes to your site, and encourage them to return to the site to benefit from the changes.

The easiest and most manageable way to do this is through an email marketing campaign. Email marketing is a logical choice for small business to promote their services and encourage repeat traffic to their websites, as it has been shown to earn the highest return on investment over search engine marketing and direct mail. It offers lower costs and a broader reach than most other marketing formats.

An effective email marketing campaign can help you keep your customers abreast of new developments and keep your business at the top of their minds. Let them know when you have added new articles or testimonials to your site, inform them of new promotions or products, and encourage them to visit your site again.

Copyright © 2009 by Research and Management Corporation. All rights reserved to WSI.

Article Source : Encouraging Repeat Visitors To Your Website Keep Them Coming Back : ArticleBase

WSI
Internet Marketing Dubai & Online Marketing Consultants

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So we all hear that traditional media is changing. Businesses have been using Newspaper, Television, Radio, Direct Mail, Telemarketing, and Yellow-page advertising for a long time now. So how is media changing?

The person who grew up reading the newspaper is literally dying off. My parents and grand-parents are in that generation. I grew up in the electronic world…TV and Radio. In fact, only three channels on TV and radio saw the switch from AM to FM while I was growing up. Cable TV was new and has come into its own during my lifetime.

My kids grew up with hundreds of TV channels, multi-media platforms all around them all the time. This fragmented media world has caused enormous issues for local business. Just look at how many pillars of the local communities have gone out of business just in the last 10 years or so.

Although TV viewing is still very high, we no longer sit and watch TV as we used to, especially not as a family. We have On-Demand programs and movies available or internet sites that offer programs that we pull up any time, any day, and increasingly the numbers are showing that TV viewing and internet surfing are going on simultaneously.

We definitely don’t listen to the radio the same as when I was growing up. Today it’s satellite radio, an MP3 player or cell phone grabbing my attention instead of my local radio stations, especially while in my car. Direct mail is thrown away for the most part, telemarketing is no longer available due to the governmental “No-Call” list, the yellow-pages are all but dead due to online search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing while most print is far too expensive for a local business to advertise in when comparing its reach.

Our current generation of consumers is hit with as many as 3000-4000 ad impressions every day. How do we in Interactive Advertising assist our clients in getting their message through all of this clutter?
There needs to be a paradigm shift. Local business can no longer market the way that it has for so many years. Things are not the same. Consumers are not the same. Society as a whole is not the same!

So what does work?

There seems to be a very successful trend in using Inbound Marketing. Inbound marketing is a shift of more relationship marketing or permission marketing as Seth Godin coined. It’s using the social media platforms and content to tell your message thus inviting the consumer to contact you. Instead of a business pushing its message out, the business is pulling its customers in.

Social Media is incredibly powerful. There are many case studies that show the success of local business harnessing this power for their message.

As a practitioner of Inbound marketing, I believe that we have to teach our clients how to use these new platforms in conjunction with their current marketing and advertising campaigns or they are just not going to be successful and they too will wind up closing their doors for good.

I’ve put together a list of five elements to making this shift to Inbound Marketing work effectively.

1. Content. Keep your content fresh and relevant. The search engines will rank you higher in searches based on these two elements. They want to serve up the most relevant content to their own customers when they do a search. If your content is current and relevant, you have a better opportunity of showing up. Business owners will say, “But I just don’t have the time to produce this content.” I say make the time, or hire someone to do it. In today’s world content is King! The content that I’m speaking of can be gathered from other sources fairly easily. Trade journals, other articles within the business category, freelance writers, etc.

Your content can be in the form of an article that is written, a blog on your Website, a newsletter, or even a video that shows customers “how to” on a specific subject. It does not have to be some Hollywood production. Just something simple that gets your point across. The main thing is to keep it current.

Articles and Press Releases are another great form of content that works well in social media. There are tons of sites that will accept your articles and the more a business can place content the better the chances of someone finding and choosing to engage.

2. Customer surveys and polls are great. These don’t have to be real elaborate, just engaging for customers to want to participate. It’s a great way to generate market research and shows customers that you care what they think. You can then release the results generating another touch point with your customer base.

3. Videos or photos should be a part of your Website. Visuals are huge when it comes to engaging customers. They see that there are real people doing business. Video testimonials from happy customers are great to use in your social media pages like Facebook and Youtube. Video cameras capable of shooting video for the web are very affordable and are easy to use. In fact, no editing is really needed for this type of videos.

4. Newsletters can serve multiple purposes as well. The traditional newsletter that went out in the mail is long gone. An email newsletter is easy to put together, informs customers of what is going on in the business and can include links to products, special services, videos, etc. An email marketing campaign using a newsletter can be one of the best marketing tools any business can implement. These don’t have to be time consuming and this too can be outsourced at a very reasonable price.

5. Monitor and engage with customers. Once a business is in social media, it doesn’t stop there. Customers will ask questions and post comments. Businesses must be there to answer. Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn, Biznik, Digg, Flickr, or whichever platform that a business chooses to get involved in, the sites have to be monitored and kept current. If a business does not have time to allot, this too can be outsourced.

No matter the business, traditional forms of marketing and advertising no longer work the same. The new ways are effective and measurable and can generate brand recognition as well as sales. In fact, both need to be considered when implementing an online campaign.

Whether a business is optimizing their Website for the search engines or producing content for a social media site, Inbound Marketing is The way to reach today’s consumer. Those of us that work in Interactive advertising and marketing have the responsibility of teaching our clients how to do this correctly and effectively.

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There have been many opinions as to the effectiveness of online display ads. Most of the articles I have seen recently state that display ads are still an effective way to get a message across, but that the click-thru rate of a display ad, not being real high, is not always that important.

I recently found a study that talks about this point and thought I would share it:
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007265

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Just about every month without fail I get emails from clients asking for a CTR report for their ads. This is definitely a measure that needs to be considered but I don’t believe it should be the sole measurement or the most important measurement when advetising online.

I recently read an article by Katie Risch, the Director of Media Relations for Centro. So,I thought I would share it.

Click Throughs, Not the Final Answer

By Katie Risch, Centro’s Director of Media Relations

We’ve all been victims of campaigns with never-ending optimizations. Just when you’ve finished moving impressions from one ad unit to another and have reissued new IOs, your client wants you to shift budgets to a different ad unit or site that is showing higher click-through rates (CTR). Oh, the infamous CTR. This rate seems to be considered one of the primary performance drivers in the industry, but when you think about it, how effective is the click through rate as a success metric?

In my opinion, CTRs shouldn’t always be the be-all-end-all measurements of campaign performance. A recent study conducted by comScore, ”The Silent Click: Building Brands Online,” focused on measuring ad performance beyond click-throughs and looked at three specific user actions across 80 brand campaigns on 200 sites over a month’s time. These specific actions were:

1) searches related to the advertisers’ brands;
2) traffic driven to advertisers’ sites; and
3) e-commerce tied to advertisers’ brands.

The control group (users who saw the ads) took action after they viewed the ad, which showed that although they didn’t click on the ad, they were still connected and engaged with the products they were exposed to. They were much more likely to visit that brand’s website later in the month and spent 50% more time on the product’s website than the average user.

Whether the user clicked on the ad or not, when they saw it they still were much more likely to engage with the brand at a later point in time than someone not exposed to the ad at all.

Another study conducted earlier this year by CBS Vision and McPheters & Company examined a similar theory stating that ads do not need to be clicked to be deemed “effective.” In their analysis, Internet users were asked to surf the web for 30 minutes. During this time, they viewed ads which were placed in relevant content and ads that were not. Ads running on Web sites with related content were 61% more likely to be recalled than ads running on sites with unrelated content. Search and portal sites generated the lowest recall levels. Local sites have a unique advantage in the industry. They have the ability to marry their content with advertisers who want to create a connection with the local community. Where else on the Internet can you do this?

The results of these studies bode well for marketers who are looking for other ways to measure and optimize campaigns versus solely relying on CTRs. This year more than ever, it’s important to reevaluate the placements on your site and be open to creative units that will suit online branding campaigns with a tailored local message. As more of these studies are released, advertisers will continue to see that click-throughs are not the final answer.

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