Yes, you can talk to your customers.
The Internet is a two-way street (or superhighway, if you prefer), especially when it comes to receiving feedback from customers or prospects. If you have an email list or even just a website, use those vehicles to talk to your customers and find out what they’re thinking. Conducting a customer survey is much easier than you would imagine. There are several online services that simplify and facilitate the process.
For 2009 Starmark has launched several Green initiatives.
For one, we have eliminated plastic water bottles. Last year we purchased and disposed of (some garbage, some recycling) 13,440 plastic water bottles. By eliminating them in 2009, we will save .75 tons of CO2 emissions.
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In paid search campaigns, buying your own branded keywords helps ensure your company will appear in search results the way you want them to, with your website as one of the lead results. On the other hand, by not buying your own branded keywords, your own website (let’s call it XYZ Cruise Line) could appear after a dozen different travel agencies that sell trips on your cruise line.
Because your customers can come from anywhere at anytime — and because a web address is easier to remember than a phone number — it’s important to put your URL on everything. After all, the Internet never closes. Letterhead, invoices, hold messages, bus benches, packaging, shipping labels, signage and, of course, ads are all opportunities to promote your URL and drive business to your site.
When a search engine crawls the Web for sites, it uses a spider. Of course, this is not a fuzzy arachnid, but an application that searches through the Web, cataloging the content on pages and the links between them. However, the important keywords and links displayed on your web page may not be visible to search engine spiders. That is why it is essential that you run a spider simulator against your site. This tool allows you to see your website through a spider’s eyes and get an idea of how the search engines see your site.
Not long ago, if you remember, the Yahoo! search engine was organized by categories, allowing Web users to search for a website in a linear way. A person would start with the general category of “Health” and narrow down their search to eventually reach a list of “Nutrition Supplement” websites, for example.
Yahoo! still maintains the Yahoo! Directory. Likewise, the Open Directory Project (ODP), based at www.dmoz.org, maintains the largest most comprehensive user-edited directory of the World Wide Web. It is a means for the Internet to organize itself, as well as an unbiased, non-promotional, non-sponsored resource of websites. And by “non-sponsored,” I mean free. And by “free,” I mean there’s no reason your website should not be listed on DMOZ. In fact, there’s one big reason to be listed.
Appearing on the first page of a search engine is like reaching the city of Eldorado. It’s an amazing feat and not easily achieved. So take a shortcut and buy your way into the natural search results of Yahoo! While Search Engine Optimization is a long-term strategy, paid inclusion offers almost instantaneous results. Basically, you will pay Yahoo! to ensure that your search result ends up on the first page of that keyword’s search engine results page (SERP), in the “Natural/Organic” (vs. the paid search area). To end users, they are clicking on the natural results, as they cannot tell the difference between these results and the truly “organic” listings. Yahoo! calls it Search Submit, but it is also known in the industry as Paid Inclusion.
Yahoo!, Bing and Ask — respectfully known as “the other three” — may not be monopolizing the current online advertising industry like Google, but they do offer other significant benefits. Since there is less competition, your company may have a better likelihood of ranking higher. Also, consumers coming from Yahoo!, Bing and Ask may convert at higher rates. As you may remember from an earlier post, it’s not just higher traffic that counts, but the traffic that converts the best. By focusing on the smaller search engines, your marketing dollars may just go farther.
Invite Google and Yahoo! to get better acquainted with your website or blog through an XML sitemap. Also called a “search engine sitemap,” an XML sitemap is a document that lists all the different pages on your website that you want the search engines to crawl, and which most major search engines can read and look for to correctly index your website, including URLs that may not be discoverable by their normal crawling process.
A Child Is Missing (ACIM), a Fort Lauderdale-based, national non- profit organization dedicated to helping law enforcement agencies locate missing children and the elderly during the first critical hours of their disappearance, gathered support from local business leaders and young professionals alike during its Holiday Fundraising and Networking event held Wednesday, December 17th at Starmark International’s StarBar Networking Center.
“We are excited that so many young professionals took the time out of their busy schedules to show such strong support of our mission, and we are grateful to Starmark for making this networking event happen at Starmark,” said Sherry Friedlander, President and Founder of A Child Is Missing. (more…)
Starmark Advertising, a Fort Lauderdale-based, full-service integrated marketing communications agency participated for the first time in the annual Winterfest 2008 boat parade and won the “Best In Lights for Showboat” award.
The emergence of social media has changed the way businesses develop, communicate and position their key messages. In a time when traditional press kits are outdated as soon as they are printed, the Web has changed the way public relations is practiced in recent years, and the trend continues to grow exponentially. From myriads of blogs, message boards, to social networks and viral messaging popping up all over the Internet, the challenge remains for businesses to break through the clutter and successfully deliver their message to the right audience.
But, where there is challenge, there is also opportunity. By determining the right social media to participate, and engage in will pay dividends from a public relations standpoint.