Understand Your Social Media Strategy 26 June 2009
Posted by muntjack in Social Marketing.Tags: Networking, Social media
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Bootstrap Marketing Tip No. 47
You may have a social media presence, but do you have a social media strategy? When we interact with people in social media, or in any other marketing activity, we have broadly one of two aims: we either want a direct sale, or we want a delayed sale from an enhanced brand image.
Social media can deliver either of these, but not from the same message. We can either encourage people to click a link which we hope we can convert to a sale, or we want them to think our product is so cool they will pass the message on to others. Understand which you are looking for and you can start to track the impact you are having.
There are three things you can do to. location3.com use the acronym MOM – Monitor what people are saying; Outreach to support positive comments and tackle negative; Measure the results.
If you are looking for direct sales you can simply measure the number of visitors referred from different social media sites, and look at your conversion rates.
If it’s indirect sales you’re after this is, as usual, more complex. You can count followers and fans, follow the path of discussions across the Media, track positive to negative comments. You can also set up ways to capture earned referrals – those who by your product as a result of hearing about it from someone else.
So, bootstrappers, know what it is you want from your social media strategy and it becomes easier to see what it is you should measure.
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Make Your Web Pages Faster 24 June 2009
Posted by muntjack in Websites.Tags: Customer satisfaction
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Bootstrap Marketing Tip No.46
Web users don’t like to wait. They will loose patience if your site is slow to load or run. They may not even wait for your site to load if it is very slow. Site speed is vital for a good visitor experience. There are a few simple things you can do: limit the number and size of images; don’t run loads of java scripts.
There are also some techie things that can greatly improve your speed, including gzip compression, which is pretty standard these days. These coding issues may be beyond many site owners, but if your site was designed by a professional, speed should be one of the issues they resolve for you.
You can quickly check how fast your site is loading using one of several free speed tests around. WebSiteOptimization, in which I have no financial interest, offers a quick and easy test. Just enter your URL and get a result in seconds. They give results scores in green/amber/red to help the non-techies, along with comment about improvement.
Google have entered the debate and are encouraging us to think about site speed, though they say it does not affect page rank ‘at present‘. See what Google are saying about web speed on their blog. If you’re a webmaster, they offer tips and tutorials.
Do you think Google will use website speed for page ranking in the future? Leave your views.
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Time to Ramp Up Your Email Marketing Campaign 22 June 2009
Posted by muntjack in Marketing, Web news.Tags: repeat sales, tools
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Bootstrap Marketing Tip No.45
New research shows that email marketing is set to grow hugely over the next five years. So it’s maybe time to take a leaf out of the books of the big boys and ramp up your email marketing campaign. The expected growth is because email marketing is seen as being cost effective, especially as people increase their use of social email accounts.
Particularly expected to grow are:
- Retention email (the stuff people sign up for)
- Use of professional email companies
- Ad-sponsored newsletters
Take a cool look at what it could mean to your business if you were to ride this email wave and begin or increase your success selling through email. Your list of prospects could stay with you for many years. Prove to them that you bring them quality advice, news and products and you’ll be a trusted provider whom they’ll buy from you again and again.
When building your email, autoresponder and newsletter campaign an integrated package is vital. The research I report above recognises this and squarely says that people in the know will be placing campaigns in the hands of the experts. When you look at these specialised areas, a little money spent with an email campaign provider can save you time, as well as greatly improve your sales performance.
I notice too that those nice people at Aweber are offering free test drives of their email campaign service. A coincidence?
