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There is a growing awareness of the need to go online. Most business owners today understand that you have to be online to even exist. The question that most of these business owners have is: Is it really for me? Or as an extension, if I go online, will I be able to sell? Is people really looking for my product online?

We tend to confuse online marketing with creating websites. And even though creating a website is an important decision and can be a powerful tool for your product’s marketing, it is hardly the only way to market online. The internet has more than websites, it is used for email, for social communication, for information and for entertainment.

A lot of times, small businesses don’t even need to have a full blown website, what they really need is a blending of their regular sales activities with the tools that internet offers.

Not having an online presence is the worst mistake ever. Hiding in your office pretending that you don’t need a presence online because of fear of exposure is not a smart move. Some businesses don’t need to do much marketing as the sales are owner driven, meaning the owner connects with possible clients as part of another activity or similar situations. These are obviously situations where the business is so small that it is only a one man shop. For larger businesses, utilizing the internet as part of the marketing strategies helps boost the sales process.

So, here the five signals that you need an online marketing strategy:

1. You have a sales funnel that needs to be constantly fed.
2. You depend on new clients as well as old ones and need to nurture relations to generate up-selling and cross-selling.
3. Your business deserves to be bigger and meaner.
4. You have ever heard a customer ask, how can I find you online? When trying to find your address or information about your products.
5. Your competition is online and crushing it. Or they are not there and you can take the lead being the first.

There are many reasons why a business can and should go online. What matters is that considering what online strategy can be applied to facilitate your business is always a great strategy. One more thing, with a proper internet marketing strategy, your customer service experience may be enhanced and provide a greater product experience to your customers, thus generating more sales and positive word of mouth effects.

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

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It is fairly common to hear things like: “my friend is a programmer and will help me with a website” and “my son knows a lot about computers and he can design my website“. People this days think that the internet and specially, internet marketing is so simple that any person with basic computer skills and probably some design or programming skills can promote with great success a business online. Worst still, most people only think in terms of a website, when online marketing is so much more.

While many online services have become simple, readily available and even free, that hardly means that internet marketing is cheap. Most programmers and designers know just a piece of the puzzle, and depending on their experience, that piece may be heavily corrupted by their personal views. The end results can go from the accidentally successful to the disgracefully disastrous.

A case

A friend of my wife is a folkloric musician. She and her husband play together. They have excellent cool music and have been doing this for years all over the world. They particularly believe in online marketing and a friend offered to do their website. They expected to attract fans and people interested in booking them for gigs, but the friend only knew about design and how to setup a pretty website.

Forward 2 years and after some heavy investment and tons of work, the website is still not finished, can’t be updated (done in Flash the wrong way) and the friend is now unable to help them because she is now in a “real” job. Worst still, they had to write all the content and don’t have the time to spend it thinking what will sell better, test it and even finish filling the pages with it!

Believe it or not, this is the third time this month I hear of a similar case, where a friend or a family member “helps” with a website and then suddenly find a job and leave the people hanging. Recently, speaking with my friend Javier, an internet marketer from Spain, he was telling me how this is a common situation in Spain. In Spain, where many people are out of jobs because of the recent economic woes, a lot are coming out and saying they do internet marketing. But just as the musicians’ case, most find a job and leave all their “customers/friends” hanging and loosing money.

Suffice to say that in the musicians’ case, they learned their lesson and want to focus on what they are great at, making cool music. They want now a real internet marketing company that can take them to new levels… and so we will.

The point

This is an excellent case of buyer beware. I have a friend who is a great dental hygienist, but I would never think of asking her to do mouth surgery on me or any of my family. Programmers and designers can be incredibly talented, but to be a real online marketing expert you have to have a combination of different things.

1. You have to know about marketing. The internet is just like any other medium. It has its rules, some are not even that new, just a re-visitation of old classics from traditional marketing.

2. You have to know at least enough of programming and design. The keyword here is “enough”. You just need to know enough so you can work with programmers and designers. After all, they are the experts in their fields, you at least need to understand them. Knowing everything on one particular subject will not let you focus on the rest… most often, great designers and programmers are obsessed with their work and understand little to no marketing.

3. You have to know about Business. If you understand marketing and the web, you still need to have a strong business sense, preferably some business experience. You are going to help people with their businesses, the least you need is to be able to understand them and provide them with the right solutions, not just a pretty website.

4. You have to know about Psychology. Even if its just a little, marketing is as much psychology as it is business. You need to understand demographics and how they relate to a given ad. Psychographics and how people may react to information or structure. You don’t need to be a full blown profiler, but knowing at least a little will help.

5. You have to have experience. You can’t start being an online marketer without previous experience. Launching a website is complicated, launching a campaign is even more complicated, but even more complicated is to predict a certain campaigns’ success to guide your decisions.

If you still want to do marketing on the cheap, there are a plethora of resources out there. You can get hosting for as low as 5 dollars a month and create a website with free website builders. Will this sell, convert or attract costumers? Most likely not, but you will sure have a heck of a time, specially writing the content and figuring out if your visitors are real prospects or just passers-by.

Marketing on the cheap, may even hurt you, damage your reputation or get you more headaches than solutions. If you just consider the time investment you have to make, marketing on the cheap may be more expensive than you think.

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

It is not uncommon nowadays to hear someone say, “I do internet marketing“. It just seems that there are just plain too many of us out there! Nothing could be farther from the truth.

There are a LOT of MLM guys out there. Most have found the web a nice place to do their “work”.

I have nothing against MLM people, except for the fact that, even though they use Internet tools to market themselves, they really are not internet marketers. They are just pedaling whatever product they have through Multi Level structures. What’s even worse, A LOT of them are pushing “Secret Formulas” to success online where they sell an ebook or a training program to teach other people how to sell the same ebook. This is far from new, but it is becoming quite annoying.

As most internet marketers out there have found, if you publish yourself as an online marketer, you get more spammers and junk marketers than most people. It seems that saying you are an online marketer gives you a target sign online and all sorts of people that “do marketing” think they can just phone you up to offer their products to “teach” you how to market. Geez!

This guy here knows what I’m talking about:

Yes, that guy is phony, but that’s exactly how many people look like.

This is not to say that some people are following you because they honestly want to learn, others really are interested in seeing what you have to say and share their knowledge to find new ways to market or have real business ventures.

Another stigma online marketers are getting is of “pseudo home office workers”. While a big advantage of the web is that you get to do a lot of work anywhere you have a connection, it is by no means an easy job for the casual “easy money” hunter. Online marketing has many responsibilities and requires full commitment and determination to learn what you need too do. In fact, most expert marketers are specializing rather than just doing everything at once, and there is a reason for that. It is also a very good reason why you need to have a team of people working with you (as we have programmers, designers and other specialists).

Anyone can be a marketer, just like anyone can be a lawyer, doctor, mechanic, accountant or business administrator. Like all those professionals, you need to be willing to learn a lot and have to prove yourself with experience. How many business owners are ready to shell out cash to you so you can experiment on their business? Really, not many.

Are you a real marketer or just a wannabe “easy money” hunter?

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

Verizon has launched an aggresive baiting campaign and its breaking the iPhone’s marketing to give Android’s spot in the world of smartphones (and very soon, superphones).

Verizon’s new ad not only spoofs and mocks iPhone’s advertising style, but completely trashes iPhone’s known issues and annoying quirks.

I know most people feel compelled to justify the expensive iPhone purchase and pretend the iPhone has no faults, but just as Verizon’s ad points out, it does have many of them.

The add completely breaks iPhone advertisement by smashing the “pretty” factor associated with iPhone and contrasting it against Android’s might and power. The message is pretty clear… that and that Verizon is not getting iPhone service.

I wrote an article talking about what “real marketing does” and showing a dissection of Steve Jobs’ state address and the usage of keywords tied to specific products. This is another kind of “real marketing”, were Verizon takes a highly beloved and publicized concept and turns it completely in its head. That’s pretty much taking the bull by the horns. Will this strategy ultimately work? Will the “Droid Does” campaign put a dent in Apple’s impressive marketing machinery? We’ll see, may the best marketing team win.

Food for thought:

1. Droid makes clear reference to Android (Google’s cellphone OS based on Linux)

2. The website is similar to the TV commercial, but adds an interesting couple of lines: “Don’t you wish you had a robot sidekick that moved at light speed, could get you out of any problem and lived in your pocket?”

3. For fast readers, did you notice that at the bottom of the commercial a line stated: “Droid is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd., licensed to Verizon.”?

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

If you have a webmaster center account in Bing, you may have noticed that Bing’s webmaster center has been down for some days. This has prompted some to speculate the reason behind such a problem and left many a good webmaster hanging for dear life as they can’t review the information about their sites. Some claim this might be the end of the world and that without Bing no human can find information online anymore. I think that’s just way overboard.

Bing webmaster center is down...

I’ve had people asking me about this and I can only provide you Bing’s response here. Basically, “We are working on it, soon it will be back”. That was a couple of days ago, still waiting!

This reminds me the Windows Blue Screen of death and the Xbox 360 Red Rings of Death… maybe we should call this the Bing Pink note of death?

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

Online advertising spending has a downward trend and some believe it will continue

As internet users evolve, they stop clicking at the first thing that moves. I remember when the internet was this strange new thing (circa 1993) and most of the time I was just trying to find what to click. That certainly changed over time. The internet has become an every day tool for most of us. The internet has permeated the way we do business, make purchase decisions, share information, keep in touch and work.

Most kids now can’t even conceive a time when there was no internet. It’s not uncommon to hear, “Dad, what did you do before to find this or that when there was no internet?” or “Really? There was no Google?”. As users (and consumers) grow online and evolve, the internet changes with them. Along with users and the web, marketing has to constantly evolve and adapt.

On my previous post, I talked about brand awareness and how some businesses benefit from this effect online. Browsing today, I found two articles about how clicks on display ads* are dropping. This has happened before, and is repeating as the most recent wave of new online users is learning and avoiding unwanted ads. Internet makes users active evaluators of the information offered and rarely are we searching for a new ad, unless you work for marketing and want to check out the competition.

I have been telling my clients that more than the stats (Click Through Ratio’s, Clicks) that most online marketers focus on, we should look at exposure, brand awareness and what Dean Donaldson calls “Dwell”. What is Dwell? I’m not sure, but I can consider it as the effect of the user hovering around your ads, not necessarily clicking, but being marginally aware of the information contained in it, and by this effect, actually generating a print in their minds which can be considered a form of brand awareness. Hence, the term Dwell will fit right into this phenomenon.

If your online expert, internet marketer or even, web designer, talks only about clicks, their missing on the effect of a well managed brand presence as brand awareness. It does matter how you position your brand, the most innocuous and simple advertisement online can mean bad associations (eg. a flicking banner annoying the user, an ad popping up and bugging the prospect) and an unconscious negative perception of what your product or service is. This would make your prospect, of course, less likely to buy from you.

Some numbers from ComScore and Starcom “Natural Born Clickers” study:

• Click on display ads has dropped 50% in the last two years;
• Consumers exposed to display ads are 65% more likely to visit the advertisers site than those that had never seen an ad;
• Half of all clicks on display ads come from lower income young adults.

In summary, heavy paid ad clickers are young, male and with low income… hardly what most companies envision as their target audience.

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

*Display ads are usually ads inserted in webpages with images, text or a combination of both.

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

Marketing is about exposure and being in the client’s mind when the need arises. That is why marketing gurus talk about “Brand Awareness” which is the knowledge a consumer/prospect/client has of a brand’s existence. This is specially important for products or services that have a high cost and require a long sales process. Examples of these are Real Estate, Cars, Mortgage Brokers. This also helps with services or products that are not a regular need, that are only needed in particular situations. Examples of these are some Translation Services, Lawyers and other situational services.

What’s this got to do with Search Engines and on top?

I was talking with a potential client about internet marketing services for his company. His company provides one of the services mentioned above and definitively can benefit from “brand awareness”. He wanted to know how being online and having internet marketing get him clients. My explanation is simple:

By creating Brand Awareness and having a permanent presence where most consumers are spending their spare time, can definitively help bring those clients when the need for his services arise. Lawyers in particular know this. That is why they invest in newspapers, radio ads, television ads, charities, having their firm’s name on the building their offices are located in and yes, a presence online. Specially now, being available online creates brand awareness. People who don’t necessarily need you now, can come in contact with your brand and when they need you, if your branding is good, they will remember your brand and call.

The question is, can I be on top and would it benefit me? Yes.

To be on top of search engines, there’s a couple of basic principles. When SEOs (Search Engine Optimization Experts) look at a website, this is what we do:

• Review of your site content or structure
  • Verify the code and the actual text
• Technical aspects of website development. For example:
  • Hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript, Flash animations, etc.
• Content development (content is king)
• Management of online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• Quality of Incoming or inbound links

Additional to all those factors, it is even better if your SEO company is also an internet marketing agency that understands customer demographics and psychographics and focus on conversion (getting a visitor to take an action on your site).

Send me your questions below and I will answer directly or with a new post.

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

I was thinking about compiling a complete source of social media buttons, but as I was researching for information, I came across a very complete guide for social media buttons.

See this blog to find out about all the social media buttons available, some of the available plugins for the most common systems and other interesting information.

And while you are at it, you can also have a look at this site about updating your status in various profiles from almost anywhere.

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

Is twitter an important part of our internet world? To most people, this is not even a question. Twitter has become such a phenomenon that everybody (and I mean, everybody) is using it. Don’t believe me, look for someone and odds are, you will find that person in twitter. Now, the reason it matters, is because it allows marketing to happen too. Not only people are jumping into the twitter wagon, but also businesses, big multi-million dollar corporations go “tweet” on a regular basis.

Now, there are many ways to tweet. One can tweet in the morning, after breakfast, with a coffee, with green eggs and ham, over a goat, in a train, with a mouse, over the computer, in your cellphone, “crack”berry or iphone. Nothing says good morning better than opening your email and being  greeted with a twitter message  informing you that you have a new follower or getting the latest news through the fastest and unfiltered vine in the planet.

Is twitter big? Just wait 'till you see the whale!

The amazing thing about it is that you don’t just get 1 follower, but all their followers get to see your tweets (if somewhat randomly). Talking about broadcasting yourself! (no pun intended)

Twitter is part of a healthy marketing strategy. Use it wisely, as it is usually the case with social media, an uncared twitter account or a minor misdemeanor, can become a big bad stain on your brand.

Tip #1 Get a twitter account

Tip #2 The very least, post links to your site or social profile

Tip #3 Be wise

Leave me your comments and questions below.

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

Mario Canamar*

*and yeah, follow me on twitter @mariocanamar

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.