Talk to companies in the hosting industry and you’d have to say yes. I deal with hosting companies every day and I’ve heard from only a few that their businesses are in decline. In fact, I most often hear that their businesses keep growing – sometimes with record revenues and profits. One company I deal with has experienced 300% growth over the past year and expects to double the number of its employees over the…
Who is it really all about? For several years I’ve read a blog that provides in-depth investigative reports I can’t get in the daily newspapers. I won’t name the blog, because that’s not the issue. The issue is that they are running out of money. Their annual budget is $125,000, which provides a modest income for the blog owner, money to host and update the blog, plus a budget to pay freelance reporters.
Frankly, there are no secrets. Good marketing works in all kinds of economic circumstances. So, the non-secret to marketing in a recession is this: practice sound marketing, paying particular attention to the rules and techniques of direct response marketing: Start by understanding your market. Who are you already selling to and where can you find more like them? What do you know about them that will help you sell to them? What do they need…
You can admit it now: In your heart you always knew the housing/credit/market bubble was going to burst one day. So now what? I recently read an item by a marketer saying they were glad the bubble had burst, because now they could get back to real marketing. What did they mean by that? If I read it correctly, the writer – a marketer – was saying that while the various bubbles grew and grew,…
Now that you’re in the thick of your media campaign, don’t sit back and wait for the sales to come in. You still have plenty of work to do. You have to monitor your results. You need to see which pages on your site are receiving the most visitors. Which ones are like Astroturf in the Sahara – they stand out and are getting tons of attention? Which ones are standing in the corner of…
The article by Guy Masono I’ve referred to in the past describes the last two of the 4Ts as Transact and Track. I’m going to discuss in more detail what I believe these two mean for your marketing campaign. Transact, Masono writes, “refers to opening a two-way communication with customers and prospects based on the nature of an inquiry.” For example, your website has a lead-generating form that visitors may fill out in order to…
Do you really know your target market? Do you know what they think? Where they live? How old they are? What websites they frequent? What keywords do they use when they search for something online? If you don’t – if you don’t live and breath and think as your target market thinks – you must find out, because once you do, then you’ll know how to market to them. You also will want to drill down and…
In my last post I talked a bit about the different strategies – tactics – one could use in an online campaign. Today I’m going to walk you through how to actually decide which strategies to use. First, come up with a budget. Pay-per-click, banners, etc. are more expensive than article marketing or even a search engine optimized (SEO) news release campaign. You can allocate your funds across different tactics, both online and off. For example, SEO,…
This week I would like to begin to address a question I get asked quite frequently – how much money should I spend on marketing and how should this be allocated between competing tactics? The first thing I always say is to never put all your eggs in one basket. Marketing is an art but yet there is very much of a scientific element that comes into play when analyzing the data (this assumes you…