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Posts from various guest authors.

Facebook Marketing & Fan Interaction 101

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Guest author Brandon Williams writes for AdMedia.com covering Internet Marketing, Remarketing, PPC and more.

Facebook is a wonderful way to utilize your personality to interact with fans and to simply show them you’re not just a big-time company that isn’t concerned with their customers’ needs. How you fully go about keeping these marketing efforts going will be unique to your business, but there are some simple tricks to keep the interaction going and build your brand through Facebook.

Get your fans involved and interaction flowing with these Facebook tricks.

Real People & Real Personalities

First, it’s beneficial to know that Facebook is a great promotional tool on multiple levels because it allows you to connect with customers, potential customers and even other companies in the industry that can help you increase your exposure. When you take to Facebook in order to promote your brand, understand that the people on there are all real and they expect you to be as well. This is a great way to show your personality and show that you care about facilitating their needs when it comes to your services and products.

It’s Not About the Hard-Sell

facebook fan interaction

Be sure to let the interaction flow for purposes that involve your business and even some that don’t. This goes along with showing your personality as you can simply engage in contact with your fans by writing a status on just about anything relevant, asking for their input or what they think about certain things. When you engage with the fans, it builds a comfortable rapport between them and your brand which can help convert them into buyers.

One of the more entertaining methods of marketing on Facebook is the use of yourwebsite to conduct scavenger hunt type deals in order to promote a new or hot item that you may be selling. Simply use Facebook to post photos of places in and around your city and have people search for what you are giving away. This allows the fans to be a part of your businesses promotional plan, get something for free and see the true quality of your product.

Deals like this and “Facebook Exclusives” get fans talking and word of mouth can bring in a lot of business.

Above all else, the biggest tip on making Facebook marketing successful is to interact. Give the fans a reason to notice you and feel that they can trust you. If you let questions, comments or suggestions go without a response, you’re not using the full potential of what social media networks can offer businesses.

Have Fun

Finally, have fun. Rarely are people going to take Facebook too seriously, so enjoy the interaction and promote what you want to promote. When you’re having fun with the fans that means they are having fun with your business, and that is an easy way to increase conversion rates and profit.

Designing Infographics with the 10 Second Rule

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Guest author Christopher Wallace, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Amsterdam Printing, has more than 20 years experience in sales and marketing. At Amsterdam, a leading provider of personalized pens, promotional pens, and other personalized items such as imprinted apparel and customized calendars, Christopher is focused on providing quality marketing materials to small, mid-size and large businesses.

Make Your Point, Fast! — Designing Infographics with the 10 Second Rule

It’s no secret that in today’s information age, where everything we need to know is literally at our fingertips, there’s an accompanying problem. With so much to take in, we’re forced to throw on our blinders.

Imagine if you took the time to read every word of every email — even spam and junk — that arrives in your inbox. That’s a full time job. Instead, we’ve learned to filter, at lightning speed. In less than one second, we can identify emails that deserve the ‘delete’ button before they’re even opened.

That same principle carries over into every facet of our lives, from media to advertising to thumbing through a magazine. Enter the infographic — in a world where we value aesthetics and the quick digestion of information, there’s no better way to tell a story (especially one with numbers) than in a picture. With attention spans at their lowest point in history (I’m just observing – there’s no science behind that claim), those pictures need to convey their primary message in ten seconds or less.

Let’s start with a recent infographic from CertaPro Painters in Louisville, Kentucky. Give it a ten second gander and then check back with me here.

designing infographics

There’s a lot going on there, but it’s very simple at the top. Where the roof awning peaks, we’re told ‘What colors to paint your home and why.’ That leaves six more seconds to notice that we’re being given reasons to paint each room a certain color — blue equals productivity, red encourages appetite.

You can click away from that without ever examining the rest of the infographic below the house, and you know the basic point: different colors have an effect on the mood and purpose of a room.

“Someone can look at it and go, ‘That’s neat,’ and then move on, but still get the message,” says Randy Krum, president of infographic design firm InfoNewt and the founder of CoolInfographics.com.

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How Content and Design Affect Website Conversion Rates

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Sam Mauzy is a blogger who also works hand-in-hand with a conversion optimization company that helps clients improve their landing page design in order to convert more browsers into customers.

Most companies have a website these days, or in the very least know the importance of having one. The purpose of having a website is to make people aware and interested in what you have to sell. Odds are that you’ve heard the term “conversion rate” before, even if you’re not really sure what it means or how to get it. When building a website, it’s important to understand conversion rate if you want to make your website work for you, rather than having it simply be a digital brochure.

Conversion rate works hand-in-hand with search engine optimization (SEO). By using well-targeted keywords, you can amp up how often your website appears in search engine results. The more your website comes up in results, the more likely people are to visit your website. A high amount of people who convert from visitors to customers starts with getting people to your page. If you’re unsure of how to write SEO content yourself, hire a content writer who’s familiar with search engine optimization.

Once people land on your website, you have the chance to boost your conversion rate. The home page is where you should concentrate most of your efforts to improve your conversion rate. If you don’t grab visitors’ attention on your homepage, you may never have another opportunity to turn them into customers again. You want to prevent visitors from closing your site before becoming a customer.

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How to Allocate Online Marketing Budget

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Guest author Sammie Mauz is a blogger who enjoys writing about digital marketing, search, and everything in between.  He thinks the merger of tech and marketing is a beautiful thing and enjoys learning, reading and hypothesizing about its future.

In order to start allocating your online marketing budget, the first and most important step is to look back at last year’s performance.  Depending on what metric you used to gauge success (return on ad spend, cost per lead, gross leads, etc.) you’ll want to make sure you’re increasing the budget for the top performing channels.  That should be a no-brainer.  Whatever was working last year, do more of it!  If you don’t know what was performing well in 2011, then it is definitely time to invest in tracking and analytics.

If you are currently unable to track where leads/sales/activity are coming from, that is a valuable place to initially invest.   The advertising channels you are investing in won’t be as effective if you aren’t able to gauge the performance.   Whether you need to change how your website collects leads or simply install analytics, it is important to know what investments are paying off and what ones just aren’t working.

Now that past performance and tracking analytics are in place, now comes the evaluation of different marketing channels.

SEO

With the implementation of the Google Panda algorithm in 2011, Google wiped out a lot of businesses small and large by demoting them within search results.  With the constant push towards wanting to promote ‘quality’ in their search results, relying on organic search traffic from Google is becoming increasingly less stable if you’re not following best practices in SEO.  If the time and money you are investing in SEO are on “black hat” or even “gray hat” practices, Google made it clear that those efforts will do you more harm than good in the long run.

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