From Telephone Poles to Websites – How Dealerships Have Changed Strategies
A few short decades ago, automotive dealerships tacked advertisements to telephone poles. Except in smaller, rural communities, telephone poles have gone the way of this form of advertising – disappeared – simply because we now have better ways of doing things.
When we place calls today, signals fly through the air instead of zipping down a wire, and so should advertising messages. There is still the option of television advertising or print promotion, and maybe you still use those mediums.
There’s also a very convenient, inexpensive way to get your product and your brand out there. It’s called Online Brand Marketing.
Online Brand Marketing is the communication equivalent of telephone pole ads on leaflets. Get that name and product out there, everywhere – in your email signature file, in comments on blog postings, etc. Communication doesn’t end at your website. Keep it going in every online transaction, correspondence and message posted. It’s easy, and it doesn’t cost much.
Beware of too much self-promotion, though. When talking about your vehicles or your dealership in a message forum or blog, be careful to serve the topic at hand and avoid posting just for the sake of getting on the board.
Talk about the related post or subject at hand and work your brand into your comments lest you be branded yourself: as a spammer. No one wants that label, so find a way to correlate the subject with your brand.
Be sure to use a healthy brand signature at the bottom of all online correspondence too, whether it be in an email, forum or blog comment. Your name, telephone number and email address aren’t sufficient if you’d like to let everyone know about the great deals you offer.
Add your branding message into your signature or your comments. Readers will see it, even if it’s a quick discussion about next week’s game. That’s called online brand marketing, and it’s the telephone pole of today.
More Keys to Affiliate Marketing Success
Being successful in the world of online affiliate marketing isn’t easy. There isn’t one single trick, idea or suggestion that will exponentially increase your sales. To be successful, you have to implement several different ideas for the best possible results. Here are just three more tips you can use to become a minor success without a ton of work.
1. Use a separate web page for each product you’re trying to sell. Seeing too many products on one page can be overwhelming for potential customers. If everything is lumped together, they can’t focus on just one product and they might click to a different company’s page that’s easier to use. Customer reviews and testimonials are also great assets for any product you’re trying to sell.
2. Offer something free to people who visit your website. This doesn’t mean that you should give away a car for every 1,000th visitor. But offering a weekly newsletter or a free e-book is a great way to bring more attention to your services without spending a penny. When visiting your website, customers are either going to buy something or they’re not. Increase the chances of their remaining on your website by giving them a reason to stay and come back.
3. Know your target audience and appeal to it. It’s fairly useless to try to sell wheelchairs if the majority of your website visitors are twenty- or thirty-somethings. By continuously adding relevant and unique content that interests your target audience, you can ensure more people from that group will visit your site. Remember, about one percent of your visitors will buy from your website. The more people you attract, the more likely you’ll have a higher number of sales.
Eight Components of Flexible Brand Marketing
One of the common denominators for successful online brand marketing strategies is flexibility. Although you should have goals and tactics in mind, it’s best to periodically reevaluate your needs and the methods you’re using to accomplish your goals. Even with this type of flexibility in mind, though, there are eight essential components to include in your strategy. They are:
1. Real Customers: Analyze your audience and tailor your message to reach those customers.
2. Uniqueness: Differentiate your company from others in the marketplace. Be unique in something, whether it’s your advertising, services or follow-up.
3. Targets: This is similar to #1, but it involves an even more specific definition of whomever you are trying to reach. Create a niche market with a specific potential customer base.
4. Goals: Set small goals and big goals for your marketing strategy. This is the best way to gauge the success of your efforts.
5. Communication: The stronger and more direct communication you have with your customers, the more likely they are to use your company. Have a strong message that they will notice more than those of your competitors.
6. Financial Projections: Have a system for showing the returns on individual product lines and investments so you can see which campaigns are more successful than others.
7. Position: Make your brand your customer’s first choice. Why would they want to go anywhere else?
8. Brand Identity: This is something you need regardless of the size of your business. Create an identity that pops into your customers’ minds whenever they need your products or services.
Brand Marketing Lessons from Guinness
Making an online brand marketing campaign a success isn’t easy. In fact, very few companies actually become successful enough to make their brands household names in a global or even domestic market. That’s why it can help to look to some of the success stories. This time, let’s take a brief look at the story behind the Guinness beer brand.
Guinness is a company that is nearly 250 years old and originated as a way to quench the thirsty throats of Irish pilgrims. When the company’s marketing staff wanted to capture what the brand was all about, this long history was definitely in the plans.
When the company built the Guinness Storehouse in late 2000, the designers implemented a variety of exhibits and displays that celebrate the company’s history. They also included an explanation about how they make the frothy black beverage. The facility also has an art gallery with conference rooms, training centers for employees, bars, restaurants and even a large open space for events. The seven-story storehouse demonstrates that the beverage maker is dedicated to the community.
According to Ralph Ardill, one of the integral minds that helped design the facility, “Guinness as a brand is all about community. It’s about bringing people together and sharing stories.”
Guinness succeeded by setting and meeting a community-drive goal to spread the message of its brand. It’s important to have a goal for your brand that you can strive to meet. Without a goal, it’s impossible to tell if you’ve achieved success in getting people to recognize your brand.
Internet Ad Revenues Reach Record High
For anyone working on an online brand marketing campaign, there’s no better time than the present for this advertising effort.
In 2007, the revenues brought in by Internet advertising reached an all-time high with more than $21 billion. And there’s no place to go but up. The Internet is quickly becoming the best way to advertise your brand or get your message to the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time.
Last year’s figures show a dramatic increase over the figures from 2006, with a 25-percent increase from the previous year’s $17 billion. In 2006, the numbers showed a 35-percent increase over 2005.
Some analysts believe the relative slowdown in traditional advertising reflects the fact that the Internet commands a larger share of the advertising dollars. When businesses or companies advertise online, they typically forego advertising in other mediums, like newspapers and radio. As such, the Internet takes money away from those advertising forms
As of right now, however, the Internet only makes up about 10 percent of advertising dollars in the United States. That leaves room for a large amount of growth. But some companies are still skeptical about the power of online ads and the number of people they can reach.
If you’re looking for ways to reach more people and get your brand “out there,” look to the Internet. It really is the future of nearly everything.
Spreading Marketing Seeds Around the Web
So you have a blog or a website that promotes your online brand marketing message. You maintain the blog and make daily updates as well as ensuring it has relevant and fresh content each time. But if that’s the only thing you’re doing, you’re missing out on a whole World Wide Web of opportunities. Consider the following tools to increase your web presence and get your brand noticed more widely.
Twitter
This free social network service allows members to send updates to their account through text-based applications. Updates are generally 140 characters long, giving the website the reputation of being a micro-blogging service. The updates are posted on the user’s front page and other users can see them or sign up for a feed to be alerted when a user updates their site.
LinkedIn
As a business-oriented social networking site, many professionals frequent LinkedIn to maintain a list of contacts and details for people in their business. Last December, the website reported more than three million visitors each month, making it a great way to get your brand marketing noticed.
Squidoo
This is a blogging website that allows anybody with Internet access to set up page that deals with anything they want. Content creators share in advertising revenue, but it’s generally a site that garners high traffic. By posting a large amount of content about your brand, business, products, services or anything else relevant to your company, you can spread the word to potentially millions of readers.
There are so many websites and methods for getting your brand noticed by the online community. We’ve discussed three of them here, but there are probably dozens more. We’ll discuss more websites in the future to help you even more.
Puttin’ on the Ritz: Luxury Appeals to Customers
If you’ve stepped into one of your local automotive dealerships in the last couple of years, you may have noticed a change. Many dealers of luxury brands are making improvements to their showrooms to make them more attractive and appealing to their customers. If you didn’t know any better, you probably couldn’t tell the difference between the dealer’s facility and a five-star hotel.
That’s because customers enjoy luxury and style. And when they step into a place that’s all decked out, it instills a sense of confidence in the facility and the people who work there.
You can do the same thing with your online brand marketing campaigns. The more stylish your website is, the more attractive it will be to potential customers. Nobody has confidence in a company that has an amateurish website, especially in today’s world where visitors judge your company by its online presence. Here are a few suggestions for making your company’s website more professional and attractive to new and existing clients:
• Break the information up into smaller, easier-to-read chunks. Nothing turns off a webpage visitor faster than seeing a huge block of information with no spaces or breaks.
• Make your website easy to navigate. Visitors don’t want to guess about where clicks will take them. Label the links efficiently to take the guesswork out of navigating through your webpage.
• Put the most important information first. Internet users have dozens of options to get their information. Don’t make them search for it on your website or they’ll just go to a website where it’s easier to find the information they want.
• Write with search engines in mind. This is very important, because if you don’t catch the attention of the web spiders, people doing general searches won’t notice your website. Consider SEO tactics and other tools that ensure a high ranking for places like Google and Yahoo.
With these tips, you can make your company’s website the cyberspace equivalent of a luxury dealership. Cater to your clients by making everything attractive to keep them coming back for more and telling their friends about your website as well.
Five Tips for Increasing Subscribers to Your Blog
In a great post written for Skelliewag.org, the blogger mentions several ways to increase the number of subscribers to your blog. If you have a blog for the purposes of online brand marketing, gaining more subscribers is one of the best ways to attract more attention and push your message in a more effective method. Here are some tips from that post and other sources to help your efforts.
• Quality is better than quantity. AlthoughGoogle and other spiders like frequently-updated content, readers might unsubscribe if your daily blogs sound more like “content for content’s sake” rather than a meaningful and useful post. Of course, an equal share of quality and quantity makes for ideal posts.
• Focus on your audience rather than topics. You’re writing for people. If you focus on the people you’re trying to reach, the topics will fall right into place.
• Make your blog’s purpose clear for new visitors.
• Narrow your blog’s focus. If you write about personal finance, narrow your focus to something like “debt relief,” “thrifty spending” or “saving for retirement” instead of the broad focus of “personal finance.” Readers can go to thousands of other websites to read about personal finance, but the narrower the topic, the fewer blogs there are from which to choose.
• Promote your blog through links and social media websites. When other blogs link to yours, your page ranks higher. Marketing your blog on social media sites exposes it to potential readers more often.
Writing for Target Audience Increases Blogging Success
To have any success with a blog that relates to your online brand marketing campaign, knowing your target audience is crucial. You’re not simply writing to the people who read your blog. You also need to write for a specific crowd. And to do that, you must also have a clearly defined target audience. To give you a better idea how to tailor your writing for maximum effect, here are some questions to ask yourself each time you sit down to write a post:
• To whom am I writing?
• What are the ages of my target audience?
• In what industry does my target audience work?
• What types of publications and books does my audience read?
• Is my target audience primarily male or female?
• Who are their customers or what businesses are they customers of?
This is not an exhaustive list of questions to ask yourself. But the more you know about whom you are trying to reach, the more of a niche you’ll fill in the blogosphere. If you’re trying to figure out the best demographics to reach, though, here are some tips to consider so you can enjoy more brand marketing success:
• Younger crowds
Teenagers account for about $150 billion worth of spending each year in the United States. In addition, brand loyalty tends to form at a young age.
• Older crowds
Those who have saved their money through the years are ready to spend it. They make a great target for your strategies if you’re selling something.
• Religious groups
Catering to a particular religious affiliation is a great way to “push” your products or services. Think of wedding planners who specialize in Orthodox Jewish ceremonies. They have the market cornered with little or no competition.
• Economic situation
You can make money by catering to either the lower-income class or the upper-income class, but you must choose one to carve out a niche.
Warning: Irrelevant Content Is Harmful to Your Blog
Using a blog is one of the best ways to conduct an online brand marketing campaign and get your company’s name “out there.” But you can’t just write a bunch of stuff on your blog and hope it gets noticed. Your efforts need to be focused and relevant to your goals at hand. That means you have to take some time to do what many bloggers call “conscious blogging.” Here are some ways to accomplish that.
• Consider your blog’s goals.
Every time you sit down to write a blog, have your goals in mind. Are you trying to get links to your blog? Or are you simply trying to increase unique views? Depending on your goals, you might even want to be controversial to provoke thought and discussion.
• Keep the long term in mind.
Most people start blogs because they want to attract notice for one reason or another. That doesn’t happen right away. In fact, it could take months or even years to become a prominent source on the Internet. Remember this when you blog to keep yourself from getting discouraged if you don’t see the results you want right away.
• Evaluate your content periodically.
If the content you’re producing isn’t achieving the results you want, reconsider the content. You might need to change it every once in a while to keep it relevant to changing ideas.
• Put the fun back into it.
Make sure you still have fun blogging. Once it becomes a chore, you lose your passion. Unfortunately, your readers will be able to tell right away and they will lose interest as well. Find topics that you enjoy writing about that are still relevant to your goals and just have fun. Your audience will love it, too.
