Power Up Your Online Marketing!
By Brian Flook, MIRM, President of Power Marketing

In our last Power Points newsletter, we highlighted three strategies to kick-start your marketing for the year. We encouraged businesses to make a resolution in 2011 to strengthen their online presence.

This month, we explore how to strengthen that presence.

The prevalence of the Internet over the last ten years took many businesses by surprise.  Even today, many don’t have websites, let alone take advantage of the many other new forms of marketing opportunity: social media, blogging, portals, search engine optimization (SEO), social media optimization (SMO), emailing and online PR.

But who has time to keep up with the endless online marketing opportunities available? The goal is not to be involved in everything, rather to determine the few platforms can be most effective for your business and master them.

That being said, here are three things you should be doing online and why:

Keyword Studies
Get a keyword study now. Keywords are the currency of the Internet and you need to make sure you are using the right ones in your online efforts. Keep your audience in mind. Capitalize on your geographic location. And target a narrow niche. We offer keyword studies as part of our SEO campaigns.

You can use the FREE Google Adwords tool to research your potential keywords or hire us to make sure you get the right words.  But the selection of keywords is of paramount importance. Words are the only way people and computers (search engine crawlers) can find your website online.

Any good marketer or sales person knows one important fact in their communication success: know your audience. Your target audience has a language. So labor to speak their language. Use metaphors and examples that they will relate to and avoid language that is confusing or difficult for them to appreciate. By understand who is reading, you can focus the content on your target audience. You can highlight the issues they care about. You should know their preferences and speak directly to them. But how do you speak to the audience you can’t see?

But be sure about this: the right keywords will get traffic and the wrong ones will not. If you’re selling IT services, you might assume your clients are Googling the words ‘IT Services Hagerstown.’ But, in fact we may discover that the popular search for that type of business is actually ‘Hagerstown computer networking.’ One word may generate four times the search activity as the other. A properly executed keyword study will ensure that you have selected the best keywords.

Get Social
It’s time you get socially involved! Maybe you’ve heard all about this “social media” stuff and the only thing you are sure of is that you don’t have time to do it. Likely that is true, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be doing it. I don’t have time to change my oil, but I know I need to get it done, so I hire someone else to do it. The three social media sites that matter the most are: Facebook, LinkedIn, and your own blog, in that order of importance. While Facebook and your blog are business-to-customer focused, LinkedIn is more business-to-business focused, but all three have value.

There are many right and wrong ways to engage in social media. The best metaphor is that social media is like a cocktail party. If you stand in the corner and silently hold your drink, you won’t gain much from the networking opportunity. But, if you engage the audience, make friends, ask questions, respond to others’ questions; you will begin to gain value. The key word is: Participate!

Track Your Presence
Are you tracking your Internet presence? Presence is very important when your website is being considered by search engines. Presence is the sum total of your Internet involvement: blog activity, press releases, website, links from other sites, editorials published, and many more things. There are several easy methods to track when your name, your company name or even your competitors are mentioned online. The easiest is to set up a Google alert for the topic you are interested in monitoring. Simply go to Google Alerts and put in the terms you want monitored and your email and voila!

Keep reading our Power Points for more tips about strengthening your online presence and your overall marketing strategy. To learn more about the ideas in this newsletter and others, visit our website at www.Power-MarketingTeam.com or contact us at info@Power-Marketing.com.