Announcements•
on July 12th, 2010•
My passion for helping businesses leverage inbound marketing to get found on the Internet, initiate more leads and convert a higher amount of those leads into customers, grows every day.
Big things are on the horizon for Keenpath that will allow us to serve you better. Namely opening up our operations in an office location in beautiful downtown Great Falls, Montana.
Our offices (click to jump to map below) will be located upstairs inside our good friends office space over at macjiggy, LLC, a graphic design and boutique company. This will be a wonderful partnership allowing us to offer big agency inbound marketing and social media marketing services, with one-on-one personal touch and niche expertise, along with the resources available for graphic and branding design at hand.
More details to come soon. Although we haven’t moved in yet, we will be soon, so stay updated on the latest announcements by subscribing to our inbound marketing newsletter. (You can also use the form below to sign up)
Located upstairs in the macjiggy, LLC office space
21 Second Street South
Great Falls, MT 59401
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(Photo credit: Wayne Mumford)
One of the things I’ve observed in the realm of social media marketing is that many marketing experts debate where you should focus your marketing efforts. This stems from a variety of opinions, experiences, and where their target market’s “hang out”.
Social media marketing puts businesses where consumers hang out. As marketers we love the plethora of information available from status updates, profile information, and other pools of data. Our society has become adept to weeding out the crap, and shoveling in the good, high quality information. Cream rises to the top.
If you look at the following chart comparing traffic metrics of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in the light of sheer volume of people to market to you might right off the bat say, lets jump on Facebook! They have massive amounts of traffic, wahoo!
Now of course there are many other social networks that deserve attention, but for sake of making a point, those three are the ones chosen.
Go where your people are
Taking a holistic approach to Internet marketing and social media marketing is key to success for any business or individual. But taking the time to find out where your target market “hangs out” is critical.
Take a look at the following world map of social networks, courtesy of vincos.it:
You probably see at least some social networks on the map that you’ve never heard of, I know I did. The key is to find out where your market is and to listen, participate and act upon where they are.
At a recent meeting I had with some associates, I was talking to a guy who has become a closer friend, and we like to bounce ideas off each other. I had sent him a LinkedIn invite to connect and reap the benefits of that dimension of an online relationship, however, he told me that at this time he isn’t going to sign up, that he prefers face to face.
I respect that. But at the same time, you can have it both ways. For the sake of time, I didn’t have the opportunity to explain why its important, particular in the industry of business he is working in, however, it got my wheels spinning and I have a few thoughts as to why it is so important to connect online and offline.
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On March 12 and 13, Mark Mathson is speaking and presenting a workshop on Internet Marketing strategy for business and organizations. The presentation is part of the 10th Annual Missouri River Break event put together by the Outreach Department at MSU-Great Falls.
Focus and strategy of the workshop
Explore strategies and techniques that you can use on the Internet that will enhance and support your business’ overall marketing objectives. Learn how to conduct promotions, generate targeted online traffic, positioning your content, and over all brand awareness. Come and learn how to make your website work to promote your business the way that you want it to.
Registration information is available at the Missouri River Break page here.
(Photo credit: sdp)
Business, Social Networking•
on February 23rd, 2010•
Networking is important for business and organizations. Personal brand aficionados also point out the value for the individual as well. The blending of online and offline contacts in a social network is key to good networking.
LinkedIn, the niche business networking social network site, focuses on building detailed and valuable profiles, connections, and groups to help collaboration and increase the level of communication.
Here are three tips to help you and your organization to get the most out of LinkedIn:
- Connect with the people you know – use the import contacts feature to quickly find out who you know that already has a LinkedIn profile, and optionally invite those that don’t.
- Make sure your profile is filled out in detail and accurate – Write a short power statement to place in the Summary on your profile and catch people’s attention. Remember that the key words on your profile help you get found in the People search feature, which is used frequently.
- Join industry or professional groups - Find a group of your interest; alumni, organization, industry focus. Join, and participate in the conversations, read through the news articles that are shared, and submit anything you find interesting.
Using LinkedIn as a resource and guide to your online professional social networking will help you leverage a powerful, well-connected network of individuals, companies, clients and prospects to maximize your value.
As Internet connectivity continues to become more readily available, lower priced, and more accessible, think wireless and mobile device, Internet users expectations have grown.
Pingdom provides their insight based from results in a 2009 survey sponsored by Akamai, compared to a similar study that they did in 2006:
Internet users expect web pages to load twice as fast in 2009 as they did in 2006. User expectations have changed significantly in just three years.
Here are some of the findings from the study:
- 47% expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
- 40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
- 52% of online shoppers claim that quick page loads are important for their loyalty to a site.
- 14% will start shopping at a different site if page loads are slow, 23% will stop shopping or even walk away from their computer.
- 64% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with their site visit will go somewhere else to shop next time.
Although this study focused on ecommerce sites, the findings should be relevant to any site owner regardless of the type of site since the results clearly show how big an effect slow load times can have on user behavior.
In the old study from 2006, people got restless if an ecommerce site took more than four seconds to load. In the 2009 study, people got restless if an ecommerce site took more than two seconds to load
More Insight
This is useful information and leaves room to ponder best practice ways and perhaps even innovative ways to architect higher performing web sites and apps. Sometimes it can be as simple as tweaking the performance of a server, leveraging the power and scalability of cloud computing, or even as complex as modifying the back end code of a web application to respond better. Either way, the benefit of meeting the demands, which can often equate to needs, is an important part of an organizations perception by customer, client and competitors.
(Photo credit: piccadillywilson)
