Good Stuff

It’s Time to Measure Marketing Success
Friday, August 26, 2011

What Goals Were Set?
Before launching any marketing campaign, it’s critical that you establish what you want to accomplish with each marketing tactic. The obvious and acceptable answer would be to increase sales, but maybe you want to increase awareness or get more qualified leads on your mailing list. Whatever the goal, make sure it’s easy to get measurable data for you and your staff. If you forgot to do this for the first half of the year, do it now. Here are some ways to evaluate the success of your marketing campaigns.

Direct Mail and E-mail Marketing
There are several ways to measure the return on your direct mail or e-mail marketing campaigns. The most important aspect is to have a clear and specific call to action consistent with your marketing goal. You can add promotional codes and unique phone numbers, or require people to show the direct mail piece in order to get the offer. Know that not all customers will take you up on the specific offer, but they may contact you as a direct result of the mailing. So you may want to compare sales from a similar time period when direct mail wasn’t in use.

Social Media
Measuring social media success can be a challenge; but if you know your goal you’re ahead of most of the competition. First, know the purpose of your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pages. If you’re trying to increase the number of people following you, or using social media purely for customer service, then generate activity that reflects that goal. If you’re trying to increase sales, determine unique and personable ways to deliver special offers and contests that will get people to act. Be careful of being too “salesy” as that could annoy people and scare them away.

Outdoor
Marketing tools like signs, billboards and vehicle wraps may be more difficult to measure success because they’re often brand awareness tools. That doesn’t mean they’re not critical to your success. The key is to keep outdoor simple, because people are often passing by in a moving vehicle. Make sure you display your phone number or website address so people can follow up when it’s convenient for them. The good news is that most of these marketing tools are long-term investments.

It’s Time to Come Out of Hiding and Get Your Website Found With SEO Edit Delete Tags Autopost
Monday, August 01, 2011

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be challenging for those that don’t understand the ever-changing rules of the game. However, whether you understand SEO or not doesn’t take away from how important it can be for your business. While there’s a lot to know, here are a few basics you should know to get started with SEO.

Images
Images are essential for an interesting website, but search engines only know the image by what it’s labeled. So the key is to name your photos appropriately when you load them to the site. For instance, if you place your logo on the site and the filename is logo.jpg it isn’t helping your SEO at all. Change it to CompanyName-logo.jpg and the search engine will find your logo when someone searches your name. Go through your site and change image names to keywords that describe your photos and your business.

Page Titles
Page titles are one of the most important items you can focus on when building your SEO. The title of each page gives you the opportunity to tell search engines what content is on each page. The title should reflect keywords that you want people to know you for and that the content on the page reflects the page title. Consider using geographical references because many users search local, such as Atlanta Printing Companies.

First 100
It is important that you know the keywords that people are searching for that will lead them to your business. Once you know what those words are you want to include them in the first 100 words on each page. The first 100 words are the most important so choose your words wisely.

In the end, keep in mind that your ultimate audience of your website is humans, not search engines. So once those humans find your site through a search, make it easy for them to do business with you.