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Posts Tagged ‘Promotions’

This is a fantastic new service that’s simple to use. In exchange for a discount or coupon code, users can tweet or blog about your business. Simkl is a system that tracks to ensure that the correct text and URL were used in the promotion process, either by using Twitter or by posting to a blog. Once Simkl validates that the user utilized the right information, they provide the user with the discount code.

Here’s a short video about the Twitter and Blog promotion service:

This is a great viral engine for promotions.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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According to Foresee… yes. Foresee is releasing some findings on some retail statistics associated with Facebook today. Here are some of their findings:

• 56% of shoppers to top e-retail websites who interact with social media websites have elected to “friend” or “follow” or “subscribe” to a retailer on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. This is an amazing testament to customer loyalty and interest in social engagement. Shoppers are actually choosing to engage in relationships with retailers on social sites.
• Facebook is, by far, the best place to reach shoppers. More than half of everyone who shops online uses Facebook, and of those online shoppers who engage in social media, more than 80% use Facebook. However, an unofficial look at the Facebook pages of the Top 100 online retailers reveals that one-quarter do not have any formal Facebook presence. In other words, half of the top online retailers have a minimal to nonexistent Facebook presence.
• Customers mainly interact with retailers on social media sites in order to learn about products and promotions—only 5% use social media primarily for customer support—a marketer’s dream come true. Consumers want companies’ information, sales and specials; retailers just have to learn how to give it to them effectively.

I disagree that “Facebook is, by far, the best place to reach shoppers.” I think this could have been better written, “Facebook is, by far, the leader in influenced social networking and the largest social network to date. As a result, retail sales based on influence do well there.” With 175 million active users, no doubt that Facebook has a large percentage of shoppers. That’s like saying, “People who drive cars are highly likely to purchase gas each month.”

In my opinion, the best way to reach shoppers is, hands down, search engines at the moment. I don’t go to Facebook to research my next purpose and my intent is never to purchase on Facebook. However, when my intent is to purchase – I often hit the search engines.

That said, I’m not discounting the opportunity for businesses to connect with consumers on Facebook. On the contrary, this Media Report proves that consumers want to connect with retailers via social media.

• 61% of respondents said that they interact with 1 to 5 brands via social media.
• 21% of respondents said they interact with 6 to 10 brands via social media.
• 10% of respondents said they interact with 11 to 20 brands via social media.
• 8% of respondents said they interact with more than 20 brands via social media.

I’ve said before that social media is an amplifier for businesses online. Facebook is a big amplifier! The interconnectivity of it’s members and the ability to share purchase decisions, is, of course a great opportunity. Especially if you have a process in place to connect and make offerings to those members.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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Yes you can definately make money from blogging.
Here is how to get started. Decide what topic you are going to write about – don’t necessary think about typical ‘money making’ topics but what you write about has to provide some benefit to your reader.
Next step is getting traffic (since traffic = more money) so each time you make a post, ping it and/or submit it to social networks like StumbleUpon.
Once you have the traffic now you can think about monetizing it. You can do this by either adding Adsense or promoting affiliate products. Keep the promotions directly linked to what your blog is about and then you can start to see the money come in!

Hanapin Marketing is hiring three search engine marketing (SEO + PPC) specialists! We’re the publishers of PPC Hero and SEO Boy and are an award-winning and fast-growing search engine marketing company located in Bloomington, Indiana. You’ll work with clients on both search engine optimization and pay per click advertising, helping drive strategy and day-to-day management. We have a comprehensive and intensive 12-week training program, so while experience in SEO and PPC is helpful, it’s not required. Apply here: http://www.hanapinmarketing.com/careers_open_positions_sms.aspx

Whether it’s Cyber Monday or the week before Christmas, you need to be set and ready to go with your PPC campaigns in advance. Missing out on extra holiday traffic can be detrimental to your revenue. Here are five things you can do now to prepare for this holiday season.

1. Run keyword reports from last November (2008) through January (2009) to see which keywords converted well last year during the holiday season. More than likely those keywords will perform well again this holiday season. Make sure you bid higher on those particular keywords for the next coming months to take advantage of the additional traffic.
2. Start running promotions early. If you plan on running any promotions like free shipping, gift with purchase, or a discount, start running that promotion in early or late October, or possibly early November. Yes, the economy is still down, but people still have to buy Christmas presents. Like last year, people are looking for the best offer they can find and are willing to spend more time researching many different websites to find the best offer. Check out your competition to be sure you’re promotional offer beats all others.
3. Create a holiday gift finder landing page. It’s true that some people know exactly what they’re looking to buy and will type in very specific, long tail keywords. But there are people who are buying gifts for their neighbors, co-workers, or just people they don’t see very often and have no idea what to get these people. By having a gift finder on your site you’re calling out great gift ideas at great prices. You can even categorize your gift finder by price, gender, age, demographic, and some sites even create categories like ‘for the chef’, or ‘for the pet lover’ and will feature these types of products in that category.
4. Re-activate paused campaigns now. If you have campaigns that are paused during the summer months because they don’t convert well, consider turning them back on for the holiday season. Since so many people are buying even if you get a one-off conversion you may yield a very high ROI.
5. Be ready for ‘Cyber Monday’. Cyber Monday is known as the Monday after ‘Black Friday’. (Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, the largest shopping day of the year for brick and mortar.) Cyber Monday is said to generate sales from people who couldn’t find what they were looking for in-store. Make sure you’re keyword bids are set higher for this day over any other day. If you’re going to have a holiday gift finder, have it up and running on your homepage before this day hits. If you’re going to have a special promotion for the holidays, be sure you have it up and running before this day comes. If you don’t take full advantage of Cyber Monday traffic you’re missing out a lot of potential holiday revenue. This day is also known to have really awesome sales and deals online, so if you don’t have any of those, try and talk your client or upper management to at least do a free shipping promotion on orders of $xx.xx to drive up your average order value.

The biggest tip is to make sure you are prepared and not working on your holiday PPC campaigns when it’s too late. Be ready for the traffic, have your keyword bids and budgets set, and monitor your accounts daily so you can make adjustments if necessary. Happy Holidays!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.