Digital Signage Progress Meeting. Today we discuss about marketing. 🙂
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Tag Archives: Marketing
Popular Internet Marketing That is Free to Low Cost
Instead of spending big bucks to advertise in print publications and participate in other costly offline marketing venues, many businesses of all sizes are turning to free to low cost internet methods and strategies to invest their time, effort and branding for a greater outreach. Because for much less than the price of one print classified ad, a company can generate many more leads, targeted leads, with methods that are free to very low cost on the Internet, while responses from print campaigns, if any, are often not worth the return on investment (ROI) in comparison.
Some of the more popular free to low cost internet marketing methods out there today follow.
1) Free Press Release and Article Directories – Well written articles and press releases help draw targeted Internet traffic to websites. Simply insert a link in the body of the press release that invites readers to visit a website for a free report or other offer in the last paragraph, and add a similar call to action in the resource box or byline or an article. Then submit the press releases and articles to free online article directories and press release sites. Find them by entering keywords like, “free article directory,” in Google or other top search engine.
2) Hire Ghostwriters – Hiring someone to write content for your blog, website, article and press release submissions work is easy to day and inexpensive when you outsource your work to ghostwriters. Find experienced, qualified writers on freelance bid sites like Elance.com and on forums in your niche and in the Internet marketing arena, like at WarriorForum.com.
3) Establish a Presence at Free Social Networking, Bookmarking and Other Sites – There are many places online where you can register for a free account, set up a web presence there, often with the ability to upload digital media to share with others, post on a blog and more, while also networking with fellow members and / or visitors to the site, as they make comments on your content, share their info and more. Some of these sites are:
Squidoo
Hubpages
Blogger
WordPress
MySpace
Twitter
Find many more by searching Onlywire.com for starters. And sign up there to bookmark all your content for sharing with multiple sites and to learn more.
A couple points to keep in mind with these sites are: follow the rules at each, don’t spam and don’t go over board there. For example, Hubpages only allows two links to your sites, at the time of this writing. Don’t add three, trying to fake them out with an affiliate link. And don’t spam comments all over on other Hubs just to get links. This type negative activity can get you banned, your account closed.
4) Free Classified Online Ads – Search for “free classified ads” in Google and many sites show up. Some of the more popular places to submit your ads are:
a) craigslist
b) backpage
c) kijiji
d) gumtree
e) loquo
f) classifieds.myspace
g) expo.live
h) adlandpro
i) usfreeads
j) oodle
For help writing your ads and even submitting them and keeping them up to date on each site, consider hiring help, outsourcing with a ghostwriter experienced with sales copy, and a virtual assistant who can open accounts at each place, submit your ads and follow up as they expire to renew them, revise them, etc.
Broadcast Your Business Through Viral Marketing
The digital age allowed the fastest and easiest mode of distributing information. Internet marketing has changed the world of selling. The old salesman wearing a flashy tie knocking on your doors, tapping on your windows and ringing your bells is a thing of the past.
Try a simple approach called viral marketing. No, it has nothing to do with those nasties around in the cold and flu season, nor will it crash your computer! Viral marketing is the expression used to describe the fast and quick spreading nature of this marketing style. To understand viral marketing better, lets take a look at what the steps you need to take are to gain better returns for your valuable time.
Look at acquiring copyright on an ebook. By selecting an ebook that discusses interesting topics or provides useful information about your product lines, you have a unique opportunity to position yourself as an expert in your niche market. When producing the ebook, aim to have it set out in such a way that your business tags and your best products are highlighted. Make sure that a link to your landing page appears prominently in each page of the ebook. Next, look at allowing your visitors to freely distribute your ebook, such as via emails, social bookmarks, links in their blogs, etc. When you allow for the e-book to be easily transmitted, then you can facilitate your desired exposure across the internet in the same way a virus spreads.
Look at setting up a forum or a bulletin. This is a straight forward task that you can do via your blog site; you can also create an egroup from a list of emails of potential customers. Place a banner appearing at the top of the bulletin board where all visitors to the bulletin will have your products in their line of sight generating interest in these potential customers. Next allow them to link your discussion board to their websites or blogs, this of course works best with those that actually have a website. Remember, that your banner alone works well for marketing purposes.
Look at trading horses. By sharing your best web design templates with other sites you can generate a unique opportunity for exchange links back to your site. By visual association, the designs that you give out for free, if remembered along with your own product lines, can create a spiraling effect. Good graphics makes a website attractive; hence, sharing your talent in graphics design in exchange of a larger share of internet traffic is a fair deal. Place a copyright notice in all your designs, and this will compel viewers to comply with your conditions as well as generating a unique link back to your own website.
Look for others who may be willing to advertise in your own viral ebook. The advantage of this is that you can also add additional links and generate additional promotion through the advertisers eagerness to promote their own business. The more this advertiser is trying to promote their own place within the ebook, the more advantageous it can turn out to be for you. By writing a good ebook you have a unique opportunity to increase the credibility of your business and the products and services being promoted.
Write and submit articles that closely relate to your product or service being offered. Be sure to include in your resource box the terms and conditions for allowing the reprint of the articles. Resource boxes are usually located at the end of Ezine articles, and most article banks use the same options.
Through the use of a variety of marketing techniques and accurate representation of your products and services across a number of formats online, you can generate a buzz around your product and place your business in the consciousness of the customers you are wishing to attract. The viral marketing format simply allows for an increase in the generation of traffic, a chance to promote into your niche market and the opportunity to ensure that your business achieves internet marketing success.
Internet Marketing Vs Classic Marketing
What I call “classic marketing” are all things that have been established, forms of advertising for the past 50+ years such as television, newspapers, envelopes, billboards and radio. What I call “internet marketing” are all new forms of advertising only recently established in the business such as search engines, social networks, banner ads and mobile media. The integration of these two mediums is one of the axes of this article and how well they will be in contact over the next year, according to projections of market and business planning. We enter into a new and interesting time that will feature many new services, advertising and great opportunities for your company to see the return on investment.
First it was Mail, which was first enacted as an official system all the way back to 2200 BC and perhaps further, the government and major merchants of the times would send mailers to wealthy individuals hoping to obtain donations or customers. Then Newsprint appeared in the mid 17th century, it was the middle of the day and its creation has been well accepted and advertised as any other form of publication was available other than the author of a book, which was expensive at the time. Then came Billboards as lithography has become widespread and even exploded after the creation of the motor vehicle when citizens would increasingly use motorways, giving them more visibility. Then you had the radio come triumphantly into the scene, revolutionizing the way people communicate and be entertained on a daily basis. Last of the traditional types of marketing was TV and the TV did explode the advertising market, entire industries have been built around it until now when the average person has 3-4 televisions in their homes.
Then in the 80’s there was the Internet, it was not anything near the behemoth it is today, but it was innovative and very useful to government and science. The first advertising was Banner Ads and was pioneered by a company that was sub-corp. of Sears and IBM. Today, these types of ads are still effective and widely used by many top sites. Then came the search engines, creating a way to find Web sites without having to know a directory or URL directly, it opened the door for PPC and SEO to create a multi-billion industry. Social Networks began popping up online and then when Myspace attained millions of users massive ad campaigns were launched targeting those potential clients and created another multi-billion dollar industry. Last with the invention of the Mobile Web and Cell Phone Internet, Mobile Media flourished and now Smart Phones make it more profitable than ever.
Now that I have defined the major markets that each category refers to I would like to discuss the current situation of each of these mediums. Conventional marketing has seen a significant reduction of investment and return on investment with the advent of the Internet, television is the only demographic group that is still growing. The success of newspapers and shippers have fallen down drastically all the time, boards have become effective only for local products and the radio has almost disappeared in some parts of the country. When the decline began each industry realized it was time or get off the train, so they started to integrate their services in the Internet, by forcing a piece of the pie that had been removed. Radio got Pandora and the other various Internet Radio services, Newspapers began creating digital copies of the daily paper and Mail has been nearly eaten up by the Internets quick and cost effective E-Mail systems. Even television has made the need for mid-range of services available online and sites like Hulu have been created. According to polls in 2011 84% of the U.S. population had Internet access in some form in their household. Market analysis show that by 2015 Internet Marketing will account 25% of all ad spending in America. The different forms of Internet marketing have proven extremely successful, banner ads and social networks moving along strong niche and many have been created to enable marketers to reach customers directly, which showed an intrinsic value of their products or services. PPC and SEO consist of the majority of marketing dollars online making Search Engine the most invested in and Mobile Media is exploding at the moment as Smart Phones become more prevalent.
It is inevitable, in theory, that over the next two decades they will slowly merge into one multi-media delivery system, most likely in a mode we cannot foresee, as we do not have the technological advancements yet. But what we can foresee is that they will, in majority, become one large Internet based medium. With the merging, it allows for new forms of marketing to develop such as T.V. Banner Ads, Radio PPC Campaigns and Internet Based Digital Billboards. It is a new marketing frontier and if you have not already gotten on-board this is the time. If you are a business that plans on operating in the next decades you need to create websites and advertising campaigns online, you need to follow the changes in the market that are projected and lastly you need to stay open to new technological developments and not turn a blind eye to huge investment possibilities that appear in the next few years.
Internet Marketing gives businesses of any size access to the mass market at an affordable price. Also Internet Marketing focuses on advertising to refined groups of people who are looking for your services whereas conventional focuses on pushing goods or services to as many viewers at once as possible. In this Digital Age we cannot try to cling with the marketing tactics of the past, the world is ever changing and so must we. At the moment Internet Marketing is the frontier, fifty years from now it will be something we can’t comprehend at the moment. Conventional methods should still be a large part of your budget but as the years pass and the markets merge, where will you be if you have no website.
Impact Marketing Digital Menu Boards
Dominos Pizza Digital Menu boards created by Impact Marketing & Consulting Inc.