Are you marketing on Facebook and other social sites?
If so, you might want to rethink your strategy. Here’s why.
Your prospects may not be interested in finding offers on social networks.
While people certainly join Facebook fan pages and follow on Twitter those “brands” they’re interested in, recent research shows consumers find email a more palatable marketing platform for reading and hearing about sales offers.
Today (21st April 2011) eMarketer reported that “Many web users like heading to Facebook for discounts, but some research suggests emails may be preferred—and more effective”.
Here’s results from a recent study from ForeSee Results:
Talking about their preferred social media sites for retail marketing messages, nearly half (47%) US online shoppers refused to choose one at all. Among the rest, Facebook was a clear favourite (40%).
HOWEVER – here’s the REAL DEAL why you shouldn’t be marketing on Facebook …
The survey also confirmed earlier research showing EMAIL still drives more shopping and purchasing than social media. More people subscribe to email lists than follow ‘brands’ on social sites.
The primary purpose of communication and entertainment for most people is keeping in touch with family and friends photos, videos and birthday reminders, and playing games.
With this in mind, a Facebook FAN PAGE is the way to go marketing on Facebook, so you not only promote your brand and your offer, but you can build a whole LIST via an opt-in and drive this using email marketing.
So the key lesson here:
Your marketing on Facebook and Twitter can be useful for alerting folks to your sales offers, but the detail should come to them via email.
A simple formula for effective direct response marketing for your business
If you’re in the network marketing home business industry – or any small business for that matter … Are you missing the magic on your message to market match?
Here’s a very simple formula I learned from the direct response marketing experts such as Dan Kennedy and David Ogilvy.
If you want a yard full of deer, do not put a 50 pound block of cheese outside …
If you want to catch tuna, you have to fish in deeper waters than for sprats …
So what’s your bait …. If you want to attract serious business builders …???
Answer: Your direct response marketing must provide …
RELEVANCE and NEED vs. CURRENT PAIN/PROBLEM and DESIRED END RESULT
How to do direct response marketing the right way is all about the right message to the right market using the right media.
Imagine how much MORE likely you are to respond to an advert or marketing message that seems to be ‘just for me’ and has an irresistable offer that means you respond … eer …. directly.
Imagine how much LESS you’d have to spend if you did a bit of thinking and research on your target market or existing customers to see who is your most responsive audience.
Message to Market Match – that’s how to do direct response marketing the right way!
Building effective copy writing triggers can prompt the buying process and lead to increased sales for your business.
Being a successful marketer comes from understanding and following some fundamentals in psychology, whether your copy is in print or online.
Before the internet, traditional direct selling meant your potential customer has physically to get up and go to the shops. With internet marketing copywriting, you simply need to get them to respond and ‘click here’.
At a recent marketing event I attended in Las Vegas, legendary marketer Joe Sugarman, now in his 70s, remarked that the process of deciding how to market something starts with you looking at a product, becoming an expert in that product, and then following a certain series of steps and rules in writing a great piece of copy that sells that product.
A great book that taught me exactly what to do is Joe’s best selling “The Adweek Copywriting Handbook”.
…
Joe talks about the hot buttons that get people motivated to buy and expands on the basic psychology involved, all of which will give you fantastic ideas to test out straight away in your marketing.
Your copy has to achieve one or more things. It has to be entertaining, interesting, motivational and/or inspirational. There are 31 copy writing triggers Joe identifies. Below, I’ve pulled out three most important ones, which I’ve personally found to work really very well indeed.
1. Satisfaction Conviction
This trigger happens when you include a statement that makes the reader feel you, the seller, are going to lose big time if the product doesn’t satisfy, so it increases the belief that the product is good.
2. Story Telling
People are fascinated by stories and in the process of telling a story, you are educating your visitor. As the old adage goes … Facts tell, stories sell. Your readers begin to know you, like you and trust you – critical for relationship building in business.
3. Curiosity Building
This trigger is super powerful. The sole purpose is to get someone to read one thing and motivate them through curiosity and intrigue to take the next step. It’s about getting the reader to move forward through your copy and keep their attention.
The next step might be simply reading the next sentence, opening an email or clicking a link at some point. So even between paragraphs, you can say things like: “But there’s more!” or asking a question such as “Why would he do that?”
Remember, you don’t ask someone to marry you on a first date … your copy writing triggers should always take them to the next step in the buying process not the whole way!
Social media marketing is a whirlwind of activity for many marketers right now – those with big, small and home businesses alike. Everyone is jumping on the Facebook, Youtube and Twitter bandwagons.
But what are the real benefits to your business bottom line?
I’ve just outlined in my latest article six ways how you might start to assess the impact on your business in terms of making money online from your online social networking efforts.
The best marketing for business success comes from the heart.
If you learn how to market your WHY … you can inspire and attract people to you and make an impact on others around you. Simon Sinek certainly inspired me recently.
I recently listened to some excellent training from Simon Sinek, author of the book “Start with Why”. Simon really resonates with our community of online entrepreneurs.
I must say I was impressed with his train of thoughts. Here’s why …
Simon talks about the “biology” behind people’s behaviour when it comes to buying a product or joining something. Marketing for business success starts with why – not what or how. It comes from the heart, ruled by the emotional limbic part of the human brain that listens – not the analytic rationalising neocortex.
As a biologist/medic by educational background and a professional personal development coach … this is very interesting insight when it comes to marketing. It’s something everyone should be basing their strategies upon.
Teaching Top Strategies in Marketing for Business Success
Top successful businesses are led by people who inspire you, by their ‘why’, their passion. You “buy into it” and stay loyal to that company, even regardless of inconvenience (cheaper product, easier to get hold of and so on).
I totally sign up to the psychology/biology of heart-to-heart marketing for business success. This is what makes it a passion. Passion comes from knowing your “why”. When you share your reasons for doing what you do, in the way you do it -also know as “mystory marketing”, you connect with other people at a deeper level.
If their ‘why’ resonate with your why, you’re on the same page – and someone would rather do business with YOU than with someone else, even if you’re in a different country!
Let me take that through to my Merry Marketer facebook page where we are discussing the most successful and profitable marketing strategies …
Click the image below to go there for the whole scoop … and let me know your viewpoint!
Is this marketing for business success an enlightened approach?
Click the link at the top of this post to share with your twitter and facebook friends and leave me a comment here…
If you’re wondering what are the top earners’ network marketing secrets, how they knock the spots off everyone else when it comes to sales and whether recruiting a huge downline and living off the residual income is just pure fantasy … then here are some home truths.
I’m talking about the network marketing secrets of top distributors who recruit month after month after month … you’d want to copy their strategies, right?
How come these superstars know just the right ads in the right places … and say all the right things to prospects that have them queuing up to join your business.
Well, such network marketing secrets can also be found for internet business opportunities as well – you see these online top earners seem to have people flowing into their downline as if on autopilot, yes?
Well it’s partly to do with success attracting success, but the question is how did they achieve the success to start with? What are these powerful network marketing secrets?
The answers lie in this free report “The Coffee House Letter – Network Marketing Secrets”
Essentially, these network marketing secrets are all about getting good at attraction marketing, drawing your prospect to you, based on where they want to be financially or physically, what they want to be able to do or look like, how they wish to be perceived by others, how you can help them and what success feels like … and by solving their most pressing problems in MLM.
Sign up below for instant access to the Coffee House Letter and change your MLM success from fantasy to reality.
HINT: Everything you need to succeed is between your ears and inside your heart!
‘COFFEE HOUSE LETTER’
Get into my Exclusive INSIDE Circle and get this ELITE training . . . Exposes the Network Marketing Secrets That 97% Don’t Know & Most Top Producers Won’t Tell!
Share the link using the buttons below, so others can get my “Coffee House Letter – Network Marketing Secrets”:
Marketing with banner ads is gaining in popularity once more
A few years ago, banner advertising was a key method for marketing your business on the internet, but two things happened that caused banners to get a bad name.
Firstly, everyone was marketing with banner ads and websites became over saturated. Colourful flashy banners in all shapes, sizes and locations cropped up on every website you looked at. The pages became so very crowded that website owners stopped placing ads and visitors stopped paying any attention to them.
Secondly, the arrival of Pay-Per-Click meant there was a new kid on the block and in the beginning, PPC was a cheap and easy way to drive traffic to your sites.
However, marketing with banner ads has come round in a big circle.
There are now fewer banners on sites – at least good ones – we still ignore the bad ones. And with search engines being increasingly particular about what you can advertise through the paid search and content networks, pay-per-click has thrown a huge number of businesses and internet marketers out of the game.
Web marketing with banner ads can be a very powerful strategy. The traffic is relatively cheap, you can target specific websites to place your ads on, even using Google Image Ads (so any site that shows Google ads will accept your banner image ads). You can even target your competitors website, since they will be a good match for your own prospects.
Done well, marketing with banner ads is once again a very good way to generate highly targeted visitors and leads.
Still, there are some principles and tactics you should explore if you are going to be successful in any banner advertising campaign.
Here are my top ten areas to research before you start marketing with banner ads
1. What sites to place your ads on
2. Where to place your banner on the page
3. Ideas/software for creating innovative banner ads
4. Designing your size/image/animation banners
5. Effective copywriting captions/text for ads
6. How much should you pay
7. Maximising your click through rates
8. Testing your ad conversions
9. Building brand awareness with banner ads
10. Banner exchanges.
Each of these is an article in itself but there are lots of resources out there already on the specific aspects of marketing with banner ads. What I’ll provide here for you are some guiding principles to get you starting on the right track.
The most your should expect to pay for your banner advertising is $1-$4 for 1000 impressions – that is the cost per thousand impressions (CPM). Build relationships with the site owners, never pay rate card prices, always negotiate during testing and for longer term campaigns. Rate cards are just a guide, shop around and propose a buget – ad managers usually have a 40-50% discounting window.
When you are choosing sites for marketing with banner ads, make sure they have good quality content on there. Some websites are there purely to pull in cash from advertising and won’t convert very well for you. Don’t just go on the rates. Sites that show fixed rates are probably just cash cows.
Make sure also that your ad is not only relevant to the sites’s visitors but that it has a chance of standing out. It must be placed ‘above the fold’ and using a innovative design that either sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb or blends into the main content so looks less like an ad.
There are several ways to create your banner ads. You can create purely text based objects just using HTML one cell table of text. Because this is generally not the norm, this can be quite effective. Or you can use banner making software that offers simple but effective banner design so you can create your own image ads.
The key thing to bear in mind here is that marketing with banner ads is not solely about how good your advertisement looks. It is predominantly about whether it attracts the right people to your business.
So try to identify where your target audience hang out (and if they take ads) and what will attract them relevant to what they are searching on that site for. What problem can you solve that will add value to your prospect.
You need to have congruence between marketing with banner ads and the site your ad takes your visitor to – do you deliver what you promise?
Finally, and this is really important too, try to get into the mind of your prospect – create a profile for them if necessary. It will take you far further than just getting the click.
If you’re website or blog is not in the top #3 spots on google, yahoo & bing and you’re wondering how to increase search engine rankings, you may be surprised to learn it’s not a matter of banklinks.
Many people when doing SEO on their blogs and websites spend a lot of time and money building backlinks. Well, whilst researching the latest search engine technologies, I discovered that how to increase search engine rankings is actually much more to do with ‘onpage’ criteria than in-bound links to your site.
Although high quality links (e.g. from relevant and high quality/high page rank sites) is important, you need far fewer backlinks if you optimise your page content using these 12 important onpage criteria.
Search engines algorithms are changing all the time and what the likes of google are keen on is relevance more than anything.
Whilst doing some internet marketing training on the latest SEO tactics for how to increase search engine rankings on my blog here, I found a great little plug-in called SEOpressor that you can just pop into your wordpress.org blog and increase its rankings very fast indeed … even if you only have a few backlinks compared to other sites.
SEOpressor is a plug-in for self-hosted wordpress.org blog sites that dramatically increases your ‘onpage leverage’ by around 10x. This is an excellent and easy SEO tool, which in my opinion is well worth the small fee to get it going on your blogsite.
This is a great service for pinging your content to push your sites and pages up the search results.
You can add your websites for free, but even better if you have a monthly subscription because you can add all your top converting articles, videos and some blog posts and the service will ping these automatically for you every 3 days – awesome time saver and worth the $8.
If you want to check if you sites are indexed … just type site: then your URL into your google search box, e.g. site: yourdomain.com and see what comes up (look at domains, pages,dates)
If you don’t see much coming up, you definitely need to be pinging your sites to tools like this.
Cheers,
Jay
P.S. Subscribe to the RSS feed to get more SEO techniques on this blog.
Welcome. This blog is intended for all who have an entrepreneurial spirit and a zest for learning. I hope it inspires and empowers you to build a profitable online business and incredible freedom and lifestyle for you and your family.
