When you created your product or service, you likely had a target customer in mind. It could be a broad audience, or highly targeted. Either way, you have a desired set of customers that will purchase and use what you have to offer. Have you clearly relayed to them what value you offer them?
It happens all too often that the perception of a target market may be the opposite of what affect you wished to have on it. With inbound marketing, the driving of traffic and converting it into leads and customers, you have the chance to be concise, clear and effective in your message, while affecting the bottom line, while increasing customer and client satisfaction. This happens with the product or service being found by the right target market and their perception being more qualified, or in line with your desired result. Both sides find success.
There are a few key differentiators from an effective message and an ineffective one:
Unclear value – Can the reader, viewer, listener understand the core value that your product or service offers?
Difficult to follow calls to action – Some calls to action are utterly miserable and are difficult to follow for the “end user”
Boring - Keep it lively. People interact better when the message being relayed to them isn’t dull and stiff, even if the subject is
By combining the natural desire you have to promote your brand in a vein of positive light, be authentic with the message and by using smart inbound marketing techniques your Internet marketing and social media marketing campaigns will have natural success.
There I was, peeking around the corner, with a rubber band in hand, to find my friend who had snuck around the other side. I saw him duck and try to hide, no cover was in site so I had a clear shot. I pulled back hard on the rubber band, stretching it to the limit, aiming carefully with my eye, and released! WHACK. I felt a sting. Did he get me with a counter attack? OK now the sting really hurt, in my eye. I had released the rubber band in the wrong direction, towards my eye, point blank. Not the best way to start off a morning rubber band fight.
Online marketing isn’t about shooting rubber bands back and forth at your potential clients and customers. Even if you write a compelling message on the band before whirling it across the room (think global), they are going to shoot it right back at you, empty handed, or worse yet, it might end up in the wrong direction. Think pain in the eye, not fun.
When attending parades as a kid, I always looked forward to being on the receiving end of the candy throwers. You know, the red convertible carrying the mayor, while his assistants would whirl tasty candy in the direction of the excited youth.
I found it even more fulfilling when I was on the candy throwing end a few times. While walking with some non-profits that were getting out the message, we threw out candy with messages attached. You could call this lead generation, and hey the advertising was cheap.
The idea of bounce back marketing isn’t new. Online and digital marketing changed the game years ago, and continues to hype it up. Your best bet is to continue working hard to tell a story your customers will repeat.
While reading through a plethora of blog posts in Google Reader earlier, I saw post after post of the same information, over and over. Links to the same source of information bowing down to (unnamed) marketing writers gets old.
Don’t get me wrong, some information is worth spreading and can “go viral”, however, it happens all to often by aspiring, and also well accomplished blog authors that they repeat the same content.
While thinking about this I thought of cover bands. Its nice, sometimes, to go to a wedding or local downtown celebration event and hear some familiar songs by a cover band. You might even get lucky and make a request that the band knows! Rock on! But tell me if I’m wrong, there is something about the original band getting up on the stage and ripping through an original song that they wrote, and that you’ve been listening to over and over on your favorite album. The intensity of knowing the audible sounds that are gracing your ears were created by the ones standing on the stage and performing.
This is similar with content. Content is such a vague term that it almost sounds cheesy and overused. What I am referring to is the story you are telling, whether its written, in video form, or audio.
Get out there and tell a story, grab the microphone and rock it up, but try not to be like Adam Sandler in the Wedding Singer, at his lowest moment.
(I have to credit Drew Schug for inspiration for the title of this post during a conversation we had on Twitter on this topic)
Before July 1, 2010, you may want to renew your .com and .net domain names for a couple of extra years as the yearly registration price is scheduled to increase by about 7% after July 1.
VeriSign announced almost 6 months ago that it would be increasing domain name fees citing the need to increase the core infrastructure that supports the .com and .net top level domains.
This price increase might not hurt the pocket book that much if you own just a couple domains, but for those that have a size-able collection of .com and .net domains, it probably will be an obvious increase from the recent past.
Just a friendly reminder, and it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to jump on over to your favorite registrar, such as Namecheap, to renew for a couple more years before the price increase.
(The affiliate link above to Namecheap was included because we’ve found them to be a reputable domain registrar)
Over at the Conversion Room Blog, Google announced a couple of ways for both end users and website owners can increase privacy of website analytic and statistic data from Google Analytics, a robust and widely popular web analytics tool to show how visitors engage with their website.
For website owners, Google is providing on their Code site, some methods to anonymise the IP address information sent to Google for geographic reports. The website owner can now set their data collection to only send a portion of this IP address information. This may have an impact on the accuracy of geographic data reports.
We are an Internet marketing and social media marketing company that helps businesses get found on the Internet, initiate more leads and convert a higher amount of those leads into customers.
When you created your product or service, you likely had a target customer in mind. It could be a broad audience, or highly targeted. Either way, you have a desired set of customers that will purchase and use what you have to offer. Have you clearly relayed to them what value you offer them?
There I was, peeking around the corner, with a rubber band in hand, to find my friend who had snuck around the other side. I saw him duck and try to hide, no cover was in site so I had a clear shot. I pulled back hard on the rubber band, stretching it to the limit, aiming carefully with my eye, and released! WHACK. I felt a sting. Did he get me with a counter attack? OK now the sting really hurt, in my eye. I had released the rubber band in the wrong direction, towards my eye, point blank. Not the best way to start off a morning rubber band fight.
Over at the Conversion Room Blog, 
