Part
of the challenge of digital marketing is that competitors are trying to
master it too. No matter how high the number, if you have the same
amount of followers, email addresses or page views as your next closest
enemy, are you really at a digital marketing advantage?
Creativity in marketing
is often the thing that sets businesses apart. While breaking away from
traditional advertising pursuits is certainly necessary for business
success, marketers should be wary of promotional equivalents to “look at
me” signs.
Take a glance at the good and bad of three popular digital marketing gimmicks:
Giveaways.
Deciding to give away a product or service, or to
sponsor a giveaway with other companies making the donations, can be an
excellent way to get new people to your site. The problem of course is
that some people enter any giveaway they see – whether they have any
interest or not in the companies behind it. You may find that a high
level of participation in a giveaway will end in a low conversion rate.
To make the most of a giveaway, make it mandatory to submit an email
address (and expressly mention that you plan to use it for promotional
reasons) and then follow up after the giveaway ends with a great
discount or deal.
Contests.
A contest will likely result in a higher number of
quality followers or contacts than a giveaway because the level of
effort is higher on the part of the entrants. Instead of simply “liking”
a Facebook page or typing in an email address, people who enter a
contest usually need to take it a step further. Perhaps you want to
facilitate a holiday photo contest, or even an essay contest for
Mother’s Day. Those who want to enter for the prize (provided by your
company) have to care enough to make the extra initiative to complete
the requested task. The downside of contests is that they are also more
work for those who host it. Rules, eligibility and shipping details are
all the responsibility of the contest host and can be a headache if not
handled correctly.
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About Megan Totka
Megan
Totka is the Chief Editor for ChamberofCommerce.com. She specializes on
the topic of small business tips and resources. ChamberofCommerce.com
helps small businesses grow their business on the web and facilitates
connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of
Commerce worldwide.
Laugh at Google's Duplicate Content Ban when You Discover...
From the Desk of Alexander Krulik
Wednesday, 11:11am
Dear Friend,
There are tons of ways to generate traffic and build your business or 
practice
online. There are new slick marketing ideas popping up all the time,
one after another, claiming to be the next best thing.
However, one of the easiest, proven, most
time-tested ways to attract new business and more traffic to your site
is to become a sought after authority and gain expert status in your
field.
One of the biggest secrets that
the top marketers don't talk a lot about is the fact that they ALL
have built their credibility, visibility, and their lists of gold by writing articles.
In fact, multi-million dollar online entrepreneur Ali Brown says that:
"This is a tried-and-true method that
will NEVER stop working, unlike the latest and greatest gimmicks to
spoof the search engines.
(Try one of those and see how quickly your traffic halts once the bottom drops out.)
Search engines love real content and will always love real content."
Ali Brown,
http://AliBrown.com
And this is only scratching the surface...
As thousands of Internet Marketers already know, backlinks from articles offer the surest route to high rankings in Google, tons of free traffic and lots of targeted customers.
That's what Yuwanda Black found out...
"I wanted to create more passive income, I decided to give article marketing a REAL try. I decided to submit one article to 25 top-rated directories for 30 days straight.
Only a week into it, my Google Adsense income has quintupled (increased 5 times) and my subscriber rate has increased three fold. And this is after ONE WEEK."
Yuwanda Black,
PubliserInkwellEditorial.com
There's nothing better than seeing first-hand the profitable results of your article writing.
And it’s a “dream strategy” for many other reasons, too.
Increase web traffic – With article marketing, visitors can constantly come to your website.
Achieve massive publicity
Build your list of targeted prospects that want to hear from you right now
Boost your reputation, credibility, and name recognition
Gain link popularity & Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rankings.
Create affiliate relationships and JV partnerships with highly influential web publishers.
So if you’ve learned to write articles, then congratulations.
You’re halfway there!
By Ruth Stevens
Have you noticed how marketers are focusing on attribution these days? Which media channel is really driving the sale, they ask. What touch sequence is most productive? Where should we assign credit? There is much confusion and gnashing of teeth on this subject, but I say that in B2B, these are the junior questions, and just a building block to the bigger issues. Sure, we business marketers want to know where to invest our precious dollars. But what we really want to know is: 1) How do my prospects buy, and how can I make their journey easier, faster, and more likely to result in a sale for my company? 2) What’s the ROI on the sale, meaning how much sales and marketing investment do I need to close the piece of business?
I’ve been looking into this attribution discussion recently, and find it pretty frustrating. In the purely digital marketing world, marketing attribution analysis actually makes a lot of sense, and the various methods that are being talked about are worth looking at. To summarize, they boil down to 4 general techniques:
First touch, last touch. This means all credit for the sale (or whatever is the desired outcome, like becoming a qualified lead) goes to the media channel that acquired the prospect (the first touch) OR the channel immediately before the outcome (the last touch). While many consumer marketers find last touch to make sense for attribution, in B2B, it’s more likely that marketers will be keeping close track of the first touch, since that is so useful for analyzing cold prospecting investment decisions.
Weighting. All recorded touches are given some credit, and weighted equally, or according to some reasonable factor, like where they lie in the path to the sale. In B2B, this method becomes problematic very quickly, since the sales cycle is so complex, involving a long series of touches, to multiple contacts in a target account, through multiple channels, many of them offline, and difficult to capture in a database.
Modeling. Statistical analysis of purchase patterns against touch sequences provides insight into the relative impact of each media channel, which can then be used for more reliable weighting. According to a 2010 Lenskold Group study, only 3% of business marketers are modeling for attribution. And even if they do, models tend to provide guidance only at a fairly high level, which doesn’t much help with granular touch-sequence decision-making.
Test and control. Hands down, the most reliable method of sorting out the impact of an isolated single variable. But well nigh impossible to execute across a multi-channel, multi-touch relationship.
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Is email marketing over?
by Richard Fouts July 30, 2012
A member of the Gartner Blog Network
Yes, if you use it as a generic outbound tool. No, if you use it as a partner to outbound marketing.
For example, a Survey by Pardot finds that nearly 70% of B2B marketers don’t think of email marketing as a primary lead generation tool. Why? The answer is fairly obvious, but I’ll review it anyway.
Email marketing, from your buyer’s perspective, is outbound spam. And – they will do anything to avoid it (TiVO, spam filters, caller ID, junk folders and the DELETE KEY are all evidence that buyers don’t want to hear from you). After all, the term junk mail didn’t come from nowhere. Marketers still send junk mail, they just do it electronically.
The Pardot survey shows a majority of B2B companies (65%) allocate less than 25% of their budgets to email marketing, while only 9% are devoting more than 50% of their budgets to email efforts. The survey also indicated that 70% of B2B marketers do not consider email marketing to be a primary lead generation tactic. Why not?
Marketers, hip to buyers that don’t want to hear directly from them, are moving more investment dollars to inbound marketing, then using email to move new leads through the sales process or to re-engage dormant leads.” So while email is alive and kicking, it’s just being used a different way.
For example, the survey also shows more than 60% of B2B marketers use email for drip nurturing. Of those, 65% personalize their messaging to align with how a prospect responds.
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