Creating online training for employees, franchisees, or sales people does more than save paper. It saves time and money, as well. You no longer have to print and ship educational materials. Nor are you obliged to fly the resident expert back and forth across the country to conduct training sessions. Studying online allows trainees to learn at their own pace, ensuring they don’t miss a thing.
It almost seems as if contests have been around since the pharaohs. And possibly they have. After all, contests are a great way to collect volumes of names and build a marketing database. Put something enticing up for grabs — an ancient pyramid, perhaps — and let the urge to win work its magic. Actually, not so fast. Nowadays, with savvier, time-sapped consumers, you may need to do more than that to attract entries to your online contest.
Your website’s footers (that bottom part of the page you think no one looks at) have evolved to become more than a place to position a copyright statement, legal statement or a second navigation bar. Nowadays, the footer has moved up the ladder – figuratively speaking – in importance.
How would you like to get your message out to 4.6 billion people? That’s the number of mobile devices out there today, and each and every one of their users could be a potential customer. From texting to tagging to custom applications, there are numerous options for businesses to communicate to consumers with personalized messages, location-based promotions and discounts, and mobile barcodes for instant access to related content — to name a few.
Mobile advertising is no longer new. In terms of proximity marketing, “Bluecasting” has been around the block a few times. Opt-in proximity mobile marketing was only a matter of time. Well, that time is fast approaching.
Where print ads, posters and signage become just part of the clutter, proximity marketing delivers relevant messages on a large scale. Proximity marketing is not intended to replace traditional advertising, but this is a valuable — yet cost-effective — supplement to that.
Attend a special networking event to help you plan your 2011 online strategy.
Come check out what our experts have to say about creative and technology trends, measuring ROI and other in-the-know tools that will help shape your marketing strategy in 2011. Starmark will be hosting several events focused on different industries, so be sure to check them out below.
The modern loyalty rewards program improves on punch cards — although they’re still nice in an analog kind of way — by linking brand loyalty with social media. In fact, in some cases, social media is part of the reward.
For example, if your business is retail, invite consumers to connect their scan rewards card with their Twitter account. Every time they earn points, their social media status will be updated with a message like “Bob Jones is 10 points away from a free T-shirt at XYZ Clothing.” Just for having his card connected to Twitter, Bob will earn extra points with every purchase, and all of Bob Jones’ followers will know he likes your store.
If you’ve ever been to a trade show, you’ve noticed that the booths can run the gamut from a table with pamphlets to sleek Euro styling to a full multimedia experience. However, unless those booths are taking advantage of a few e-marketing methods, once an attendee walks by, he or she may be gone forever.
Level the playing field on Yahoo!, Google and other search engines by buying the branded keywords of your competitors. Recently, we turned you on to the importance of buying your own branded keywords. By buying your competitor’s branded keywords, you would ensure that whenever someone searches for the name of their business, your company’s name would also pop up in the paid search results. This is a common tool, and one you can use with a clear conscience. While most people think this is something the search engines don’t allow, they do, but with some restrictions. For instance, you shouldn’t pretend to be your competitor or even use their brand-name in your ad. As long as you represent who you truly are, you should be good to go. But you might want to check with each of the search engines you are advertising on to ensure you are not breaking their terms of service.
Mobile tags (also called snap tags and scan tags) are little icons with a lot of potential. When consumers “snap” the tag with the camera of their smartphone, they are instantly linked to online information such as a website, contest, video or beyond. Bearing a close resemblance to bar codes, mobile tags allow you to put a little Internet in your print advertising and a little print advertising in your Internet, two great mediums that work great together.
When you position your brand or company on Facebook, Twitter and the like, you’ll be opening yourself up to positive feedback – as well as negative feedback. And that’s okay. Really. It may seem counter-intuitive that negative feedback can actually boost your image, but it’s true.
Photos from the 50 Winning eTip open house in our new larger Celebration office, near Orlando, FL.