There are over 30 marketing channels in existence today. Traditional marketing, Direct marketing, online marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing, mobile marketing etc.
As a business owner or the marketing manager, how do you correctly choose which mediums to engage. Unless you are an enterprise company or have a lot of money to throw around, it is very hard to engage all of these marketing channels.
Do you need to use all of these marketing channels?
No. You should work on a channel(s) which your target audience will most likely interact with.
How do you pick the right marketing channel for your target audience?
Do some research on the audience. By research you don’t have to run focus groups, all you have to do is think what marketing channels your target will use.
- What age-group are they?
- What social networking site do they use?
- Do they watch a lot of TV?
- Would they drive to work and listen to FM on the way?
- Do they use e-book readers?
- Are they hip and music oriented?
- Do they go to pubs?
- Do they subscribe to newspapers?
- What can the content of the going to be more interested in?
- What kind of mobile are they most likely to use?
The more you know about the audience or that target market, the better you can focus your marketing and advertising around channels that they are more likely to be interested in and interact with. If you have a tracking and reporting analytics system on your website, you can get answers to some of these questions through that.
Step 1:
Go to www.twitter.com and click on the green Sign up now button
Enter your Full Name, Username and Email. Also put in a password and the words displayed on the box and Click on “Create my Accountâ€. When you create your username, please make it business specific, that way it will be easier for other tweeters to search for you and follow you.
Twitter will allow you to import your Gmail, Yahoo or AOL address book and invite friends to follow you
You can skip this step if you like. ( If you would like to import your contacts, click on the service, put in your email and password and you’ll be given a list of contacts to invite. )it
Finally twitter will automatically put in recommendations for you to follow. Feel free to uncheck the ones you would not like to follow. Surprisingly “Jeremy Piven†is on the list. Leave him 🙂
Click Finish and you are all set. To put a new tweet, just put it in the “what are you doing boxâ€. They are limited to 140 characters. To follow other tweeters go to their page. Such as Dzineclub (http://www.twitter.com/dzineclub) and click on Follow. That means that you will get more updates from Dzineclub in your twitter account.
The last stage is to then promote your twitter account via your website/email marketing/business cards etc.
Happy Tweeting!!
If you have never had a website before, this is what you need to start up. Basically if there was no internet, it would be the same as starting a brick and mortar shop. Lets look at the steps. You would need to register a business. For an online website you would need to register a domain. You have choices of the following (www.yourbusiness.com, www.yourbusiness.net, www.yourbusiness.com.au, www.yourbusiness.net.au). There are other domain endings as well but we do not recommend using them unless you are a non profit organization or an association or a mobile website.
Once you have the name sorted, the next stage is to lease some space. As you would rent out a space or a shop for your physical store, you will need space on the website. This is called website hosting. Please make sure that you get enough space (at least 100 Mbs and 1GB traffic) per month. This will ensure that if you get an upsurge on the number of visitors, then your website can handle it.
Now the third step is to create a custom website that explains what you do and put it on that space. Similar to having brochures/products/logo on your physical store, this is where you can hire a web designer, such as us :), to look after that part. There are a lot of things that go into building websites and a lot of considerations. A website now is not just a website. A good website is what does the work for you and brings people in without you having to do too much. A bad website pushes out information to the people who you invite and send links to.
The last stage that most companies do not think about when building a website is the marketing side of things. As they where I come from “if you talk you can sell flour, but if you can’t you can’t even sell riceâ€. Marketing epitomizes this. Its all good to invest in a website, make it the best website in the world. But if nobody knows about it, how are you gonna get return from your investment. So when you plan your budget, it is wise to set a part of it for your marketing. How do you market initially. Basically depending on your budget, here is what you can do
Free
– Word of mouth, tell your friends families and ask them to spread the word
– Submit your website to various directories on the Internet such as Yahoo Directory and DMOZ
– Find other businesses who compliment your business and exchange links with them on the website (but make sure you are not in direct competition). So if you sell paintings, a framing business is great as a partner.
Small Investment
– Create leaflets and leave it in mailboxes
– Business Cards and PostCards
– Email Marketing And so on and so forth…
Out of all the marketing channels, email marketing still exists as one of the most popular forms of online communication. It is cheap (basically free), can leverage the data of your users easily, provides high levels of personalisation and customisation. This results in email marketing providing the highest ROI out of any marketing channels.
However all that looks and feels good is not as it is
There are however a few considerations with email marketing. As good as it can be for you to push your brand, if not done properly it can work against you.
Previously, because of its low cost of sending and easy acquisition of email addresses (someone can easily guess an email address), a lot of spam companies have abused email marketing to send users product offers, spam and fraud emails. The result of this is that your target audience is scared and thinks that most of email marketing is spam.
How to generate trust
The first step towards successful email marketing is to generate this trust with your customers. You have to be aware of these pitfalls and make sure that when you are communicating with your users that you proactively create a trust so that going forward your subscriber gets the content that he wants, and you have a high deliverability rate. You create this trust by good and open communication, personalising the content to their needs and letting them know how you got their details.
Things to consider if you are using email marketing for the first time
- Let your subscribers know why they getting an email. Usually at the bottom of the email you would have a messages saying “Dear XYZ, you are receiving this email because you have subscribed to receive information from ABC company by putting your email address on our website.
- Always put an unsubscribe link on Your email
- Always put a view online link on the email
- Always test your email on multiple email platforms such as Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, entourage ETC
- If your company deals in verticals where there’s a lot of Phishing, instead of asking the users to click on a link, ask them to type in the link instead.
- Make sure that your emails are tracked from the email marketing provider so that you can see what the click through rate was
- Make sure your website is tracked properly so that you can see how the e-mail traffic contributed to your online goals.
DzineClub Email Marketing Solutions
Here at DzineClub, we adhere to email marketing best practices and guidelines. If you would like to know how we can help you push your brand further and provide you with high ROI please ask us for the quotation or feel free to send us an email at info@dzineclub.com
