Riding the Facebook Wave to Marketing Success

April 27, 2011 – 9:24 am

Everybody’s on Facebook! Indeed, the current estimated number of users has reached 400 million (and counting) – and these are only the active users. By “active users” we mean the users that are (to some degree) involved in updating their status and commenting on other friends’ updates. This also means that they post pictures and join in discussions. They may even have their own grandly designed farms and coffee shops.

And businesses have recognized just how powerful a platform Facebook is. That is why everyone is trying to get a share of this pie by way of Facebook promotions. And the power of “word of mouth” – or in this case, “click if you like it” or “show this on my Facebook feed” is tremendous. We can’t help but join contests to win a free trip or a DLSR camera, especially if one friend has already signed up or “liked” the promotion.

Facebook’s Take on Promotions

Due to the number of fake promotions and hoaxes, Facebook has set up a number of rules. This process of setting up the rules is still a work in progress. Also, the guidelines are primarily for those who are running sweepstakes-style promos and contests. (“Sweepstakes” are games of chance while a “contest” is based on one’s skill.) Trivia quizzes, giveaways, coupons and surveys are exempted from these rules.

As of November 2010, all promotions and contests given on Facebook should be delivered using a third-party app on the Facebook platform – the App must be approved by Facebook. One doesn’t need permission from the Facebook authorities to promote a contest (but it does if one administers the contest on Facebook). One also doesn’t need to meet a specified minimum ad spend on Facebook.

There are also certain kinds of businesses that are not allowed to use Facebook for promotions. You are not allowed to have promotions where minors and citizens of countries that are undergoing U.S. embargo can freely join. Facebook also does not allow promotions where people are required to buy the seller’s product first or that give guns, alcohol, drugs or tobacco as prizes.

Facebook Promotions Tips

So, now that we have the basic rules Facebook has on promotions out of the way, here are some strategies and tips to help ensure that your Facebook promotion is a success.

Build momentum. Understand that your promotion may take time to take off. So you need patience to continue with the promotion even if you don’t see any significant effects on the first few days the promotion is run. The key is to be able to build up a fan base.

Be creative. With so many things bombarding a Facebook user, you have to stand out to get noticed. There are two ways that can work – the humorous way or the “information source” method. You can run a contest or promotion that is unique and funny. One example would be a storage company’s “Messiest Garage” contest, where the winners are those who have won the most votes for having the most cluttered and unorganized garage. The prize, of course, would be several months’ free storage rental. Or, Southwest Airlines’ “Fans Fly Free” raffle. Facebook can also be used extensively by daily-deal sites to notify fans of the newest deals. One “controversial” promotion is Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice – which gave away a whopper if one “unfriends” ten of his friends. The promotion was eventually cut down by Facebook because of violations of promotion guidelines.

Avoid spam. Nothing is more irritating than spam and having to deal with spam on Facebook is not an exception. Facebook will be the first one that will act to put a stop to this – and if Facebook gets wind of violations, you may find yourself summarily kicked out of Facebook.

Reach out to your fans. If you can try to interact with fans on a one-to-one basis. Build a rapport with every new fan that comes your way. Making the extra effort to build a connection with fans may very well be the start of a lasting relationship.

Entertain and Inform. Don’t use your newsfeeds only for announcements and promotions. You should tell a funny anecdote or joke (that is related to your business) or provide an information update. You can also share a relevant and interesting quote or statistic. This gives your fans something to look forward to and adds another level of interaction you have with your customers.

Use incentives such as coupons. Of course, it depends on your business. Coupons and other incentives help to drive customers back into your website to make purchases. You just need to be creative in formulating these incentives and be willing to experiment until you find the right incentive for your customers.

Adaptivity Pro and Your Promotions

If you’re thinking of doing a promotion or campaign on Facebook, you can look to Adaptivity Pro for assistance. Adaptivity Pro is a Salt Lake City Utah Web Design and Utah SEO firm. It also provides copywriting services and drafting of strategies for promotions, such as in Facebook.

 

Posted in Social Media Marketing | No Comments »

Daily Deal Site Marketing

April 20, 2011 – 9:23 am

Who can resist the temptation of getting a good deal? Why pay the full price when you can actually shell out just a fraction of the cost? This is the driving force behind the success of daily deal sites that have cropped up – all offering the best deals for food, services, hotel accommodations, massages, and so much more. As one daily-deal site (Wow.com) put it, they “offer up your bargain of choice… at an astronomically discounted price, helping you stretch your hard-earned dollar to infinity and beyond.” Who could say no to such a promise?

Ever since the phenomenal success of Groupon (a daily-deal site that has been valued at a whopping $1 billion), a lot of other daily-deal sites have cropped up like mushrooms. Aside from Groupon, some sites that have followed suit include Yelp, Living Social, Wow.com, Yipit, At Cost and so on.

How Do Daily Deal Sites Work?

The concept is basically simple. Most of these sites work by getting the customer’s location and emailing him with the newest and hottest deals in that location and nationwide. These deals are offered every day. For Groupon, the requirement is that there should be a minimum number of buyers for the deal to push through. There are also daily deal sites where the more people sign up, the bigger the discounts.

Other sites have similar approaches, with slight variations. But essentially, the customers are buying discount vouchers. Some sites also enable them to earn credit or points by inviting friends to join the site and buy into the deals.

As a merchant, daily deal sites can do wonders with drawing in customers to your business. This is done by posting your business’ deal offerings in the site. Usually, the site will target local subscribers specifically. A number of the daily deal sites will only require payment for every generated sale. There are also those that will charge for a percentage of the sales.

Local business owners may also benefit from other elements of a daily deal site: namely, easy purchase/distribution system (the customer can easily make an impulse buy and just charge it to his or her card), referral system and incentives, extensive use of social media such as Facebook, and vouchers that have expiry dates for use.

Will Daily Deals be good for your business?

The question is, is your business ready to jump into the daily-deal marketing strategy? Also, will it work for your business?

Let’s take a look at the advantages and the disadvantages.

Advantages of working with a daily-deal site:

-          Allows you to considerably direct foot traffic to your business. This is particularly helpful for small businesses that have yet to establish themselves and win a solid customer base. When compared with other advertising options, the return of investment in working with a daily-deal site ranks as one of the best.

-          Helps you win customers without considerable cost and effort on your end. Sites that have Cost Per Sale policies provide you with exposure and mileage even as you don’t have to shell out anything in upfront costs. Also, aside from providing you with very cost-effective advertising, these sites will require a little investment of time. All you need to do is create the offer, write the copy, design the online offer and set the limitations of the deal. The daily-deal site will do the rest for you.

-          Enables you to generate cash flow in a jiffy. Since daily deal sites end fairly quickly, you can easily generate cash if your deal offering turns out to be a success. You will certainly enjoy the cash flow that is raised in just a few days.

-          Allows you to study success of the deal offering since results are measurable. You can more easily determine how well your campaign is received by customers, something that other advertising options are not able to do (think TV ads, radio or print ads).

-          Increases your exposure and gain mileage in social networking sites. Get people to “like” you and “follow” you – in Facebook, Twitter and other similar sites, that is. People are quicker to click the “Like” button because of the deal you are offering. And the kind of exposure you get is exponential – people who see the deal may share it or re-tweet it to friends. This allows you to create more buzz regarding your business without spending a lot of bucks.

-          Helps you reach your desired customers. Mainly, people who join daily-deal sites are people who are ready to buy. They are internet savvy and are active online (as well as offline). They have the ability to share their experience about your business to their friends. This is the kind of customers you want to reach and retain.

Disadvantages of daily-deal sites

You should also be aware that there are disadvantages. Knowing these disadvantages can help you find a way to work around it.

-          Fewer profit per customer. Since you are already offering your products or services at a discount and there may be additional charges tacked on by the daily-deal site, you can potentially make far less than what you’d normally make had the sale had been generated in other ways.

-          Negative effect on the brand. Customers see your company in a certain way. Depending on your product, offering discounts may actually reduce your brand’s value in the customer’s minds – that you are somehow “inferior”. At the back of their minds, they may be thinking, “There may be something wrong with the product, since they are on sale.” Also, you may be lowering the price they are willing or expect to pay the next time they avail of your product. So, if you are offering a premium product or service, daily-deal sites may not be for you.

-          May give you customers you are ill-prepared to handle. Is your business ready to handle the influx of customers? If not, you may have a lot of dissatisfied customers in your hands. This will result in negative reviews which will hurt your business. There may be issues of overbooking and a decline in service levels.

-          May give your customers the wrong mindset. The thinking is, they’re there to enjoy their savings. This will mean that they will go to your business to redeem their deal and not spend for other items you have. For restaurants, this can also mean lower tips for your waiters.

-          Pressure to maintain exposure and retain customers. The exposure you have with daily-deal sites may be a double-edged sword. How do you maintain the interest of your customers after the deal? How will you ensure that your customers remember you and their experience with your business?

-          Reduced employee morale. With more customers (who tend to tip less), your employees with have more work.

Additional tips

Now, having seen the advantages and disadvantages of daily-deal sites, here are some things to remember if you want to work with daily-deals sites.

-          Work with the right sites. There are a number of daily-deal sites that cover a niche – determine if reaching these niches is also fit for your business. You also need to make sure that the sites have a good reputation so that you can protect yourself and the image of the company when the daily-deal site “misbehaves”. Also look for sites that have a considerable following.

-          Offer reasonable packages. Don’t yield to the temptation of giving “offer your customers can’t resist”. This may actually cost you more by way of lost profit.

-          Make the offer time-sensitive and set restrictions. If you don’t have a time limit for redemption, the vouchers will tend to just stay inside the customer’s wallet. Also, make sure that the customers understand the conditions and the fine print so that they fully understand what they’re buying and what they can expect.

-          Avoid having deal offerings too close to each other. The customer will just think, “I’ll wait for the next offer.”

-          Don’t sell too much of one deal offering. You may find yourself overbooked. Only sell what you can handle.

-          Follow customers up and provide great customer service. This will help keep your customers coming back to you so that you strengthen your customer base. The customers will come back if they are satisfied with what you had to offer – and they’ll be paying in full the next time!

How Adaptivity Pro can help

It takes a strong understanding of what makes daily-deals tick and how you can “make it tick” for your business. Adaptivity Pro can help you set up your daily-deal, as well as analyzing the success of the offer. Adaptivity Pro is a Salt Lake City web design company. It also deals with Utah SEO, Utah PPC marketing, copywriting and blog content services.

Adaptivity Pro is committed to providing more results (in terms of leads, traffic and of course, revenue) and websites and blogs put up in very little time.

 

Posted in Social Media Marketing | No Comments »

Boost your Website Traffic with Article Distribution

April 13, 2011 – 9:22 am

The equation’s pretty simple. You write interesting, relevant and unique articles and then post them in article distribution websites (also called article marketing). You take every opportunity to add your website URL to these articles. With the use of strategic SEO keywords, you can actually increase the traffic coming into your website.

Why Use Article Distribution?

We do business in the World Wide Web – big emphasis of the “wide”. With so many businesses and entities fighting for attention and getting more people to visit their websites, you need to have a strategy where it’s easier for people to find you (or the product or service you provide) in the internet.

Article distribution has some distinct benefits:

-          Cost effective. With the right tools, you can generate a lot of unique yet relevant articles that people will find interesting to read. Also, some article distribution sites charge only a minimal amount – with some sites allowing you to post for free.

-          More backlinks. With these articles, you can have backlinks that point people to your website. Effective articles are known to have been able to generate some 150 to 200 backlinks. Although a more realistic result is set at around 50 backlinks per article.

-          Increase Google visibility. With more backlinks, your Google results will increase for strategic keywords.

-          Targeted traffic. Since people are already reading your articles because they have an interest in the topic being discussed, this means that the people you reach are more targeted.

-          Establish your reputation. With article distribution, You can show yourself as an expert in a particular topic and people will want to look into what you have to say once you have established your credibility.

Article Writing Tips

To help you make the most of article marketing and article distribution, take note of the following:

-          Focus on one topic. Don’t go off-tangent. Be sure that the article covers a major topic.

-          Keep your articles relevant. First, to what people want to know about. It’s no use coming out with an article on a topic no one is interested in. Secondly, the article should relate to what you’re selling and what the people can find in your site.

-          Know and follow the guidelines for article submission. Each distribution site will have its own set of rules – and if you don’t follow these rules, you run the risk of being banned from the site. One important thing to remember is that spam and affiliate links are usually banned from the articles or even the resource box.

-          Use a catchy title. This is the first thing one sees when he first opens your article and it will indicate to him whether your article is worth his time. If you don’t grab his attention with the title, more likely than not, he won’t read the article. One way to catch a person’s attention is to show him one major benefit to his reading the article. For instance, “Get Gorgeous: Makeup tips that Bring out Your Beauty” is more interesting than “Taking a look at various kinds of makeup”.

-          Keep it short and sweet. The fact is, no one really has time to read your article in full! What most people do would be to just scan the article to get the pertinent facts. Also, keeping the articles short will make the readers want more information – and that will get them to visit your site. The rule of thumb is to write articles that are no more than 1,000 words in length.

-          Check for mistakes. Ensure that your article is free of grammatical and spelling errors. Errors will undermine your image as an expert in the topic.

-          Write for the readers. Remember, readers are not there because they want to learn more about you. They’re there because they want information on a certain subject. So, be sure to provide that information. Also, your writing should be in the active voice – as if you’re there talking to them. To make the articles more interesting, you should also use anecdotes and stories related to the topic.

-          Don’t forget your URL and call to action. Be sure that your URL is easily seen (for some article distribution sites, you are allowed to insert URLs only in the Bio portion of the article). Also, drive the people into doing something after reading the article – a call to action that point them to the website. Examples would be “Click to avail of this one-time offer – visit my website!” or “Know more about ___________. Click here.”

-          Spread your articles. Don’t just post in one site, get your articles in as many places as possible.

-          Look for opportunities to write as a guest blogger for a reputed site. By far, this form of “articles distribution” is one of the most effective ways to improve visibility, recognition, and of course, traffic to your website.

Article Distribution Sites: Our Top Picks

Here are the more popular article distribution sites you can submit your articles to:

-          EzineArticles. This is one of the most effective distribution sites in the Internet. It has proven its effectivity in the noticeable increase in traffic after one posts here.

-          Buzzle.com. Good site for back links and SEO. The review of your article may take time, though. Also, if your article does not pass muster, there are no notifications stating such.

-          IdeaMarketers. This is primarily for aspiring writers, as well as e-book authors. People can also ask to reprint your article if they like it, on the condition that they have your permission and that your full bio and contact information are attached.

-          GoArticles.com. This is one good site if you are thinking of spreading your articles across the internet.

These are just some of the article submission sites available for you. Other sites include articlecity.com, selfseo.com, articlebiz.com and articledashboard.com.

The way you go about your articles will depend on what you want to accomplish. If you are going for traffic alone, you can try submitting a number of unique versions of one article (commonly called article spinning). However, if you are going for building a strong network of back links and increasing your reputation (as an expert), you should look into popular article submission sites that have consistent page rank.

For quality SEO-rich articles, you can go to Adaptivity Pro for help. Adaptivity Pro is a Salt Lake City, Utah SEO as well as Utah web design provider. We also provide content for websites, blogs and article submission sites.

 

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

Use Local Utah SEO Techniques

April 5, 2011 – 9:48 am

Optimize Your Google Places Ad

Local listings that make use of SEO opportunities are not only an important part of Utah online marketing for your small business, it is essential. The problem is that these days it is not enough just for you to simply create an ok looking listing. You have to put some real thought and effort into it. This is the only way that you can make local online marketing work for you as a valuable tool for your online marketing. Following the tips and strategies of those who are experienced will help you a great deal.

Why Use Google Places for SEO Purposes?

The answer to the above question concerning local online marketing is because it will greatly increase your exposure to real potential customers.  You can take advantage of the great feature of Google Places for your business in any city of this nation and get equally great effects. Google Places is a wonderfully effective marketing tool that was introduced in 2004. It displays the information for local businesses. Here are just a few keypoints:

• 82% of local searches done on Google end up with the person contacting the business
• 73% of the Internet’s activity relates to Google’s local content
• 66% of all Americans find local business through the use of local search

For local searches, Google displays a total of seven results on the first page. Getting a ranking within Google’s top seven requires a lot of time and effort. Creating and making the best use of Google Places can be a very good start in your account to do so. You can get started immediately by registering and adding your business today.

How You Can Benefit More from Google Listings

There is much more to do when concerning online marketing. Once you have successfully added the business to Google Places, you will then want to optimize their listing so that you can get the most effectiveness from that listing. To do this, you need to become aware of the various options that Google Places as to offer in addition to what you have already done with your regular search engine optimization efforts. One thing that plays to your advantage is the fact that these listings appear above all organic traffic. They also take up much more page space than in the regular listing and include a very noticeable map to the top right side of the ad.

After your website is done and you are ready to set up your Google ad, the very first thing you need to do in order to optimize your listing with Google Places is to follow their rules and terms. Be sure to read them and to take heed. You do not want to waste all your time and effort in creating a listing only for it to be suspended or removed. For instance, do not create more than one listing per phone number, or you could find yourself having to go back to edit or create an entirely new listing.

After the initial steps are completed, there are also plenty of other ways that you should consider in order to play on the highly competitive field of Google Places. Following are five key ways in order for you to get within the top seven local results for Google:

1.       Create a listing in the other large local directories such as Bing, Best of the Web, Foursquare, Yelp, Yahoo, and Hotfrog.

2.       When creating your description, use keywords and list a few of the areas where potential customers live.

3.       Be sure that your listing has a score of 100%. You can do that by filling out absolutely all of the available fields. Surprisingly, most businesses do not do this even though getting into the top seven now demands that you do just that.

4.       Get reviews by encouraging your clients to write them inside your Google Places listing.

5.       Add your address and phone number in the footer of your website to let Google know where you are located.

Google Tips that Support Utah Web Design

Now that you have a general idea of what needs to be done in order to get the most benefit from  Google Places listing that follows, it is now time to go into a little bit more detail on what can be done for the purpose of optimizing the ads that place. Below are some very effective and important tips that you should always follow. If you can do these things you can maximize your chances of getting within the top seven.

• Complete all of the blank fields on the first submission page. It is extremely important to not leave anything blank. Even if the information is not required, try to provide something within the field. The more content you put in your listing, the more Google likes it.
• Take the time to carefully write a description. Include at least a few keywords as well as your city and state. This is not a place to waste space since you’re only allowed 200 characters.
• When filling out your company name, there are a few things you can do in order to optimize the content within this field. One thing you can do is include a keyword within this field. Another thing you can do is add the name of your primary city. It is important, however, that you do not go overboard. For instance, if you attempt to cram more than a few keywords into this area, it is likely that your competition will notice and report your listing to Google.
• In order to choose a category, type in your best keywords and see if any category suggestions come up that are relevant. You are allowed to choose five categories and should make use of all five in this way if you wish to get the most out of this section.
• Other things that you will want to take care of will include the Service Areas and Locations Settings, business hours, payment options, photos, videos, and additional details.
• You should, of course, make sure that you link your listing to your website. Also, if your business has multiple locations, you should make sure that each location has a subpage on your website and that you individualize your listing so that it will point to a particular location on your website’s subpage.

Adaptivity Pro is a local Salt Lake City web design and internet marketing company.  They know all the Utah SEO techniques to help a business see more traffic flow to their website. They know what each of their clients need to do and will let them know all their internet marketing options. They specialize in design work, programming and search engine optimization activity to provide the best return on investment for businesses.

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »