Our previous entry in the Internet Marketing Strategies focused on creating a Marketing budget. Today, we continue with Strategy #2.

Strategy #2: Researching the Marketplace

Let’s face it. The Internet is too vast to market effectively to every corner, so targeting your message delivery to key locations is critical.  How to find those key locations? Fortunately, there are many tools that can pinpoint those locations. A few tools listed by MarketProfs include:

1. Google alerts http://www.google.com/alerts – Sends an email whenever a key word or phrase is mentioned in online content

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With any emerging marketing channel, it takes time for the stakeholders in your business to recongize it’s value. Social Media is one such channel. As a marketer, you recognize it’s value but how do you convey this to stakeholders who are responsible for your bottom line?

Know your budget constraints:

If you are prepared to discuss the financial and personnel resources required for a social media strategy, you will look educated and more credible when stating your case to stakeholders.

Here is a list of common items to budget for when planning your social media campaign:
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Given that it’s Friday, I thought It would be appropriate to discuss Twitter’s follow friday phenomenon.  Follow Friday is nothing new. In fact, it started in Mid-January of 09 by the Tweeter Micah Baldwin.  I am often asked about it’s use by Twitter newbies, hence the reason for this blog post.

So what is Follow Friday anyway?

Simply put – a Follow Friday Tweet contains the usernames of other Twitter users that you think your followers should follow. (Say that 10 times fast…). The Tweet usually contains the hashtags: #ff or #followfriday so that users searching those hashtags can monitor the day’s reccomendations.

Why would you want to reccomend people to follow?

Well executed social media campaigns make building relationships a priority. If you recongnize someone you are following as valuable with a Follow Friday Tweet, it can only strengthen your current relationship with them. It will also strenghen relationships with your followers if you provide quality reccomendations (see below).

Here are some guidelines for your Follow Friday Tweets:

• Don’t reciprocate Follow Friday Tweets unless you genuinley want to. Spammy Twitter accounts often send out Follow Friday mentions with the intent of receiving a reciprocation for exposure.
• Don’t arbitrarily choose your Follow Friday mentions. Briefly explain why your followers should follow your canditates in your Tweet.
• Don’t feel pressured to send out a Follow Friday mention every Friday. If you did not engage with any new Twitter user’s this week, wait until you do. Remember, quality over quantity counts in your Tweets.

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Previously, we discussed the creation of this series, Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies for Beginners. Today, we continue our series with Strategy #1.

Strategy #1: Start preparing your Marketing budget

You wouldn’t expect that launching a new television or radio advertising campaign to be free, would you? Of course not, but many businesses are under the mistaken impression that since a web page can be changed with the act of typing, the cost of Internet marketing is free. Or management may say “The intern can handle it by himself, we don’t need to pay for that.” Such notions are common and must be held up for scrutiny. A MarketingProfs study suggests there just a few of the costs which could arise in an Internet Marketing campaign:

• Time and personnel used to create professional, compelling content on a recurring basis ( you wouldn’t let just anyone create a TV ad for you, so why trust that job to the intern?)
• Training of personnel to use social media tools
• Time spent in addition to normal duties to push out new content
• Advertising dollars
• Giveaways, promotional tie-in items

Once the hidden costs related to Internet Marketing are recognized, they can be assessed and refined as you start focusing on the creation of your marketing content and the delivery of it through the Internet.

Check this space again for Strategy #2 in our series, Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies for Beginners.

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Last week RTP Designs attended Internet Summit ’09 (#isum09) – a conference that united likeminded businesses and internet professionals right here in the Triangle.

This entry focuses on my impressions of the conference agenda, speakers and material presented.

Please note that these are my thoughts and opinions and not necessarily those of RTP Designs.

Venue:

The conference was held at the Raleigh Convention Center. Parking was ample, but cost $7 each day…ouch. The reception on Wed was held in a business casual setting complete with fine appetizers and an open bar. (beer and wine). I was lucky enough to be approached by some of my Twitter followers later in the evening as the gathering transferred over to the Oxford - a quaint pub in downtown Raleigh.

Keynotes:

Aside from the 5 minute video plugging ESPN.com, Jim Kosner’s keynote was informative and entertaining. He educated the audience on ESPN’s strategy for content delivery on multiple mediums such as web, phone, TV, radio etc. Many companies make the mistake of concentrating on one or a few media pipelines to deliver their message. ESPN proved that thinking outside the pipe (so to speak) can bring excellent results.

Richard Jalichandra of Technorati provided some interesting metrics on how bloggers monetize:

• Display Ads:  40%
• Search Ads:  39%
• Affiliate: 36%
• Paid Postings: 8%

Other than that, there was some additional discussion on blogging trends for 2010 but overall I was not too inspired by this discussion.

Search Marketing Panel:

I was particularly impressed with Jason Dowell of Triangle Direct Media . He exuded an in depth technical knowledge and explained the architecture necessary to stay one up on search engine algorithms. While most of this was not new to me, his ability to articulate the subject passionately added to the discussion. Ian Kelevich of eMarketer beefed things up with some stats and outlooks for the Search Marketing industry. He noted that overall advertising spend was down 15% in 09 and search marketing spend is projected to increase 6% next year.

Analytics Panel:

This panel focused on the ongoing maturity of the analytics industry and how the issue of data integrity is holding it back. Dan Forootan, an obvious data-head was passionate on the subject of data integrity. When asked what his recommendations were for improving data he replied: “Hire better programmers” which I found amusing. However, I think it takes more than clean code to make analytics worth your business’s time. KPI’s are different for every company and need to be defined correctly. Once businesses’ begin to this effectively, the value of analytics will become more evident.

Online Advertising Strategies Panel:

This panel was a little general for me but moderator Gian Fulgoni (chairman Comscore) did an excellent job of creating debate on the subject of traditional V.S. online marketing. Fulgoni kept stressing that traditional branding offline was still just as important as marketing online.  At first, I disagreed. However, Fulgoni raised the point that 80% of purchases are still made offline, which changed my perspective a bit. I am still however, partial to online marketing.

Email Marketing Panel:

Aside from the debate on whether or not social media would eliminate the need for email marketing, this panel was somewhat stale to me. Ultimately the panel agreed that social media and email marketing are intertwined, which is my take as well.

Conclusion:

Overall I was happy with this conference. It provided great networking opportunities and it was good to see both local and national businesses come together to discuss business and technology. However, I would was hoping for more advanced material in the panels.

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Whenever I share at a social gathering that I design Internet Marketing campaigns, people stop whatever they were talking about with “I have a friend that owns their own business and they want to do this Internet Marketing thing. Would you mind talking with them? Oh, they can’t really pay anything, but I’d really appreciate it.”

And so began my quest for a way to help out my acquaintances without going broke providing one-on-one training. After numerous days of going back through my marketing presentations on Twitter, Facebook and other social network platforms, the outlines for a series of informative posts which I call “Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies for Beginners” began to take shape.

Why create a series on using the Internet for marketing especially for beginners? To start, the social media and Internet Marketing medium is changing so fast, that someone casually looking for easy tips on how to begin Internet Marketing can easily find information that was relevant just a month ago, but no longer applies to today’s fast-moving market. And the amount of information that exists in this domain is so vast, that the person who really wants to focus on their business can easily be overwhelmed.

All of which brings us back to the series. I will provide some analysis, some insight and hopefully some thought paths to get things started so if you are a business owner, you can begin formulating your own strategies which apply to your business, not the one next door. Check back in this space for the first post in my series “Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies “.

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