5 Essential Components of Localized Marketing Strategy for National Brands

A whopping 90 percent of consumers now use search engines when researching products or services in their local area, according to BIA/Kelsey.

Google began more aggressively serving local results in October 2010 due to the shift and growth in local search commerce by consumers and advertisers. Advertisers in turn have boosted their local marketing investment. Borrell Associates forecasts local advertising will grow to reach $19.9 billion in 2012.

Some national brands have already come to realize online visibility has become the most important ingredient in their local marketing mix. Scalable, automated technology can help them overcome slower national competitors and smaller local competitors who lack marketing support, but whether they leverage automation or manually support local stores and offices, national brands should make sure to consider at least five initiatives in any local marketing effort.

1. Leverage a Comprehensive Data Distribution Solution

Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Dex, AOL, Yellow Pages, Citysearch, infogroup, Localeze and hundreds of other sites encourage businesses to submit their location information, not to mention the opportunities available in GPS and mobile devices.

National brands should do this at scale by implementing a data distribution system to ensure customers can find correct information about nearby physical locations, make contact and visit the correct address. Automation technology eases the burden, particularly for national brands supporting many physical locations, enabling new information to be added one time and trigger updates in hundreds of online listings.

2. Claim & Optimize Listings on the Most Widely Used Sites

Ninety-seven percent of consumers search for local businesses online, according to Google. Through Google Places for businesses, the search giant enables brands to ensure local visibility free of charge. Yahoo Local and Bing Local offer similar complimentary listings, and these go a long way toward helping businesses reach potential local customers.

While an automated data distribution system would capitalize on these opportunities and hundreds of others, most searchers will use one of the local services from Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Brands unable to automate a comprehensive data distribution program should at least secure complimentary listings on these three properties for all physical locations.

Once basic listings have been claimed and verified, marketers should go on to optimize these listings based on location, business names and categories, custom fields, and business descriptions, as well as by publishing and optimizing photos and videos of each location. Taking the time to properly optimize these listings won’t just help a brand’s physical locations become more visible on the SERPs; it also helps brands put a friendly face on each location and boost the odds of creating true local engagement with customers.

3. Localize Content With Automation

Like data distribution, managing content across a national brand and numerous locations can weigh on a marketing team and limit overall effectiveness. In fact, according to the CMO Council, 86 percent of national marketers plan to localize their strategy, but only 30 percent of marketers use local automation platforms (October 2011). A local marketing CMS can provide regulated access to corporate, regional or local employees and partners to help national brands spread the workload without sacrificing control.

Maintaining brand integrity and control has long been a top concern for national marketers, but the amount of work to be completed has grown by leaps and bounds. Custom, optimized location web pages with unique URLs are just the first step. Many national brands now provide physical locations with their own mobile location web pages, as well as social and video pages on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other top sites.

4. Manage Ratings & Reviews; Incentivize Happy Customers to Share

Reviews have become vital to the success of national brands and physical locations, but controlling this content and ensuring a consistent brand voice for each location can be tricky. Marketers should never lose track of the fact that consumers and search engines love the authenticity of reviews. Marketers should put a comprehensive program in place to incentivize happy customers to share their positive experiences.

At the most basic level, national marketers should support individual physical locations by claiming pages for each location on prominent review sites, integrating unique review links to corresponding locations, and working with local staff to instill an effective review gathering and management program. Taking the time to create collateral, talk to staff and offer true education about best practices and benefits of local customer reviews can mean the difference between a beloved or loathed reputation for any location.

5. Performance Measurement & Reporting

It isn't always easy for national brands to secure the budget and resources necessary to effectively boost visibility for its physical locations; so performance measurement and reporting should be part of every campaign. The right approach can provide insights to help continually improve ROI, ensure efforts keep pace with goals, and help justify marketing investments over time.

Measurement and reporting can incorporate a wide range of response types. Call tracking, interactive voice response, corporate reporting dashboards, automated monthly reports by location, marketing analytics integration, click tracking, video views and Facebook leads are just some of the ways national marketers can measure local engagement and return on investment.

Above all else, getting started matters most. Altogether ignoring the need to boost local visibility for its physical locations can spell doom for even the most beloved brands. Ninety-seven percent of consumers now use online media to shop locally, and national marketers should assume a responsibility to support their local storefronts and physical locations.

National brands have an opportunity to leverage locations to dominate local visibility and reach more customers, and these five components should be part of any localized marketing strategy. Automation technology can help marketers save time, scale the effort and support a full national spectrum of physical locations.

This Local Search Marketing Checklist offers a handy guide to help manage the process and insights about what to look for in an automated technology platform.

5 Sure Fire Tactics to Promote a Business Blog

Relevant, Consistently Updated Content + Flawless Technical Functionality & User Experience = Perfect Blog Launch

What’s missing from the equation above? You guessed it: blog promotion.

Creating a glitch-free blog with informative content means next to nothing without attracting readers.

Start promoting your blog today with these five effective tips:

1. Involve influential industry bloggers.

By linking to popular blogs, you can gain the attention of both the influential blogger and his or her readers.

But your blog won’t be the only one to benefit. You’ll be giving the other blog a little link juice – and be paying them a compliment at the same time.

Try out a few of these ideas for leveraging other blogs:

• Create a post around an interesting concept published by an influential blogger:Be sure to attribute the information to the blogger and link to his or her post. And don’t forget to offer additional unique insight to make the post your own.
• Interview an influential blogger and turn it into a Q&A post: That blogger is sure to link to your post, and his or her readers are likely to visit your blog as a result. Side benefit: Including the insight of a thought leader will help position you as a thought leader as well.
• Create a list of influential blogs: Include popular blogs from your industry, and include a link, short description and even a screenshot. Online Marketing Blog has successfully done this with its BIGLIST of online marketing blogs. Publish a blog post each week highlighting one or two new blogs to promote the list and acquire another link to the list.

2. Promote your blog via social media.

If your organization already has a solid presence on Twitter, Facebook or other social media channel, leverage your followers or fans to promote your new blog.

For example, when a new post goes live, create a short tweet with a link back to the post – and provide the link on your Facebook fan page.

A few tips to keep in mind:

• Whenever possible (we know how quickly 140 characters can be used up!), include the blog name in tweets and other social media messages.
• Auto-feed new posts to your social media accounts with tools like FeedBurner. But if you choose this option, make sure your headlines are as compelling as possible for social media.
• Maximize promotional efforts by asking employees to add the blog URL to their signatures and personal social media accounts. Employees can also re-tweet posts that they find interesting.

3. Create “link-bait” posts and “sticky” headlines.

Creating compelling headlines or posts that resonate with social web users is another way to garner attention for your new blog.

Try some of these ideas:

• Write counter-intuitive posts – i.e, “The 10 Worst Online Marketing Ideas” or “The 5 Quickest Ways to Get Caught in the Spam Filter.”
• Incorporate celebrities into posts (if appropriate for your industry) – i.e., “Top 10 Celebrity Tweets of the Week”
• Leverage the sticky headline formula, “number + adjective + sticky message” – i.e., Lee’s recent post, “10 Must Read Tips to Start a Small Business Blog” (see image below)

How to Promote Your Website

Getting your website found is difficult, tricky but by no means impossible. Although to get found you need to put in hard work, time and effort. Here are a few tips, suggestions and ideas as to how you can promote your website.

1. Get it in search engines. Get your website onto google, dmoz, and even yahoo. If your not in search engines people cant search for you, or even accidently stumble upon your page.

2. Blog about it. Blogs sometimes get more recognition than websites so why not start a blog or 2 to promote your business and your website. You could blog about your website and use your blog as a direct promotional tool, or you could blog about your life, your daily activities and so on and use your blog as an indirect promotional tool for your website.

3. Get social networking. Get onto social networks if your not on them already such as facebook.com and myspace.com, create a profile for your website, your business or yourself, add your website information in your profile and then get out there and start networking, adding both existing and new contacts.

TOP TIP: Create a website promotion/marketing budget. Create a workable website budget that should include details of everything you want to do to promote your website and how much it will all cost. Remember that promoting a website doesn't have to cost the earth and remember that its all a matter of trial and error and market research. Find out what your target market or audience will respond to best, for example do they use search engines more, if so then you will need to formulate an aggressive SEO Plan (Search engine optimization plan) Do they respond better to social networking websites. If so then get on there and get promoting your website

4. Promote your website offline. You could do this through direct mail, through press releases, through adverts, and through word of mouth.

5. Promote your website through Pay Per Click (PPC) put together a PPC strategy or plan to suit your budget, your business and your websites needs.

6. Get linking. Promote your website through linking to other peoples websites and getting them to link back to you. Linking with other websites is free promotion for you as it can help you be seen by the other websites target markets and so on.

7. Write about your website. Write articles, press releases and news releases on topics your website covers. Send these to interested parties or to article directories to help with your site promotion and to help it get noticed.

TOP TIP: Remember to be different when promoting your business. Being different will help you stand out from the crowd and it will help you get noticed. Think outside the box when it comes to promoting your website and getting it out there.

I hope you have found this article both useful and helpful, Good luck with promoting your website, I wish you every success.

5 Simple, Effective Tactics to Promote a New Website

I’ve been building quite a lot of sites recently, both personally and client related. In this time I’ve observed quite a few strategies that are key to helping a site grow from scratch. Traffic is usually what the success of a website lies on, so you need to know how to build traffic as effectively as possible. Luckily, over the last 2 months I’ve helped launch over 10 sites and quickly drive them to large amounts of relevant traffic and lots of feed subscribers. With this in mind, I wanted to put together a selection of what I’ve learned; this isn’t going to be ground-breaking and you might know some of it, but putting them all in one place should make for this useful resource.

5 Tactics to Use

1. Utilise MyBlogLog

If you’ve never heard of MyBlogLog (where have you been?) then I’ll give you a quick run down. Basically, MyBlogLog is a Yahoo owned community based around your blog and its readers. When you sign-up you get to fill out your profile¹ and even register your community² which is for readers of your blog to show support. You’ll notice that any fans of your blog who are already on MBL are likely to register as part of your community.

MBL also offer blog statistics, I used to use them a while ago but because of a few issues in the service i.e. some people could appear as Shoemoney when visiting sites, so I lost a bit of trust in them. My favourite part of MyBlogLog is that whenever you visit a site with their ‘visitors’ widget’, your profile is going to be shown³. Therefore, it is important to pick a relevant username and a memorable avatar. This is excellent for branding and you’ll also notice a few people checking out your profile on the site.

2. Register on Twitter

About one year ago I wouldn’t have recommended this, even though the service was around. This is mostly due to the fact that Twitter had quite a varied audience and people didn’t really think to use it to promote a website. These days however, Twitter is an excellent way to drive traffic to a site and build your name in a niche, especially with their now huge userbase.

After you’ve registered on Twitter¹ make sure you fill out your profile² and use the same avatar as MyBlogLog. This is important for branding purposes and it’s also going to set you out from most users of the site. Note that people are more likely to notice your tweets (status updates) via your picture rather than your username. Once you’re all set-up you need to start adding people to follow³ and interact with from the niche of your site. If you are passionate about your niche then the discussions these people are having should interest you. There are multiple ways to find a relevant audience:

1. Look for links to twitter profiles on your favourite blogs
2. Perform the Google search ‘site:twitter.com “niche”‘
3. Import your email contacts when you sign-up
4. Try a service like Topsy, a twitter search engine and look for your main keywords

If you want more people to follow you, make sure you put a link to your profile on your blog.

3. Sign-Up to Gravatar

This one is relatively simple but it is definitely effective for branding and comment traffic. Gravatars are the avatars that show up next to comments on many blogs (this is increasing all the time) and is built by the same team that builds WordPress. Gravatar works by assigning your email address to a picture, so whenever you post a comment with a certain email, your picture will appear next to it. I’m very big on branding so I keep this the same as the avatar on Twitter and MyBlogLog. 

4. Register on StumbleUpon

Once again with StumbleUpon, I like to keep the branding and avatar theme running so whenever I sign-up or recommend others, I tell them to use either a personal name or site name for their username. Secondly, use the same image that has been used elsewhere as your avatar. Now then, there are 2 things you want to do with your StumbleUpon account: 1. Set-up your interests so you can find a lot of relevant content and 2. Stumble the blog posts of fellow niche bloggers and let them know about it in their commentsFor all the bloggers in your niche you find on the site, make sure you add them as a friend. You’ll typically find they link to their profile on their own blog, or they are always reviewing pages from their own website. When you add them make sure that you send a personal message which includes their name and ask them to add you as a friend. This can be time consuming if there are a lot of SU users in this niche but it is definitely worth the effort. Once you have started to build up your network you can help spread the traffic to others in your niche and even make use of the ‘Send-to’ function whenever you write a post of your own. One more thing I do on StumbleUpon is message all the people that thumb-up one of my personal posts. I thank them for taking the time to check out the site and also ask them to do a friend exchange. Once again, this is time consuming but it is a nice personal touch and anything to help increase traffic to your new website is a bonus.

5. Start Leaving Comments

Last but definitely not least in the list is to start leaving comments on other blogs. The follow-up to this post is going to look at all the various ways to find the top sites in a niche, there are more than you would expect. I’ve watched bloggers like Sean, Avani, Alex and Evelyn seriously increase traffic and activity on their sites by being very active on the blogs of others. I recommend commenting on other blogs for a number of reasons:

• Small amount of traffic from the site you comment on
• Increase branding & niche exposure (think: gravatar)
• Site authors are much more likely to link to your posts
• It helps establish a relationship with an author, this can definitely be helpful if you need their assistance in the future

As they always say, you can have the greatest content in the world but if you aren’t active online or promoting your articles in some way then nobody is going to see them. These steps are very simple but can also be very effective to get your brand out there and start promoting your new website.

Effective?

I did say these tactics were going to be effective and I keep to my word, think about how all of this interlinks. Whenever you visit a site to leave a comment, you are instantly shown as a visitor on their MyBlogLog widget, just for visiting. Now whenever you leave a comment, besides the traffic you get your avatar is showing next to it if they had gravatars enabled. All your comments and Stumbles are going to be a great way to build up relationships with others which you can leverage for links or promotion help whenever you write a worthy post. When that worthy post is ready, don’t forget to tweet it ;).

10 FREE GUERRILLA TACTICS TO PROMOTE YOUR WEBSITE

It never ceases to amaze me: that more people do not avail themselves of the following:

1. Submit to Google local, and Yahoo and MSN local business centers: it is still free, and it is still the most underutilized, free advertising out there: if you are too lazy go to UBL.org and pay $30
2. Post partial posts on other blogs and groups – so simple: you write a great post like this one, post partial posts all over other blogs, Yahoo groups, Linked-in groups etc….
3. Start and manage a group that is on-topic – I do ot know why more people don’t go to the trouble: but they don’t: for instance my group I founded at Active Rain: http://activerain.com/groups/WEB20 – it has 810 subscribers and growing and only 415 posts, I would put to you that it is what I delete, that makes it successful, and not what I add, but it is still an available targeted marketplace for me.
4. Participate on other blogs and in other groups – you do not need to start a group to access it’s members, just join one.  I have found groups at linked-in and yahoo groups with 3-4000 ready prospects for me that read everything posted – heck I can join any group on meetup.com and have access to all the group members immediately by email.  From local politics to singles and all points between, there are groups that target your market.
5. Join the local chamber of commerce, go to all the events – the oldest, and still most underutilized business resources: the local chambers of commerce and local visitors advocacy groups – every city and state and even some counties have government backed groups and agency designed to create jobs, promote touristy, and otherwise benefit your local economy.  By getting involved you get exposed to the members, and potential members.
6. Warm calls – anyone who hangs out a card or brochure or group profile anywhere is fair game: I call them warm calls because they are advertising their business and must answer the phone: if you are looking at their yellow page ad or PPC ad or any type of advertisement the person paying or arranging for that advertising wants to know how and why you came to see the add: “warm”.
7. Follow up – nothing new, here, but just as underdone as the others: WAKE UP! THE HOTTEST PROSPECT YOU HAVE IS THE GUY WHO YOU HAVE ALREADY TALKED TO – FOLLOW HIM OR HER FOREVER UNTIL THEY BUY, DIE, OR ASK YOU TO STOP! If you do not mail-merge your prospects, clients, and contacts you are missing 50% of the business you could be doing.
8. Write about yourself – I cannot tell you how many times I have heard of someone being very perturbed at the constant self-promotion of a competitor – well, if you cannot beat them…join in: write about yourself!  Well placed articles properly formatted can completely control what happens when someone ‘Googles’ your proper name or company name – control your online reputation
9. Solicit reviews and ratings – from yelp.com to digg.com and all points between, this new world of user-generated, user filtered content is not going away, and it will become even more widespread – YOUR ENEMIES WILL ALWAYS FIND A WAY TO SLANDER YOU, BY ALL MEANS INVITE YOUR FRIENDS TO DO THE OPPOSITE!  – You can write your own reviews on Yelp.com, for instance..
10. Invest your time rather than your money – expensive advertising can work, but, if you supplement that which you must pay for with that that is free, you will leverage your reach – start a personal blog and make yourself famous one post at a time!

I make my entire living online: I work from home, work in cyberspace, and my company is low overhead giving us a competitive edge.  I am sharing the wealth here, please, join me, and join in!

Flickr Marketing – 6 Awesome Tactics to Promote Your Website on Flickr

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that competition is tough out there, even more so today, with the economic downturn. Marketers, and in our case, Internet marketers, must search for unexplored territory, a marketing potential which is yet untapped, or hasn’t been fully exploited yet. Flickr offers this tremendous potential for marketing and a unique possibility to showcase your company and products.

Flickr is a social networking site that was launched 5 years ago as a way to enable users to exchange photos and images. As of November 2008, it reportedly hosts 3 billion photos. It is now one of the most popular social media sites. To fully exploit its marketing capabilities, here are some tips that will point you in the right direction.

1. Choose the Right Screen Name
The screen name you choose for your account will become your URL on Flickr, so you should use a competitive keyword. It will most likely get you more traffic than your company’s name.

2. Splurge on a Pro Account
You can get a free account and upload up to 200 images. However, if you wish to use Flickr for marketing purposes, then you must look professional. A pro account will only cost you 25 bucks a year, and it’ll definitely be worth it. The “Pro” badge next to your name will grant you greater authority and the respect of the community.

3. Properly Name and Tag Your Images
It’s very tedious and dull, but if you don’t tag your images, there’s no point in having a Flickr account for marketing purposes. As users search for images, say on Google, or any other search engine, they have better chances of coming across your images if they are properly tagged. The use of good keywords for the titles, tags, and descriptions is absolutely essential. Also, in the descriptions you can include URLs and direct users to your company website, or any other external resource.  Here lies the main marketing power of Flickr, and the reason why if used properly, it could greatly enhance your profits. 

4. Participate in Groups
There are lots of companies that already are on Flickr, maybe even some in your own industry. By joining groups and participating actively, you network and create valuable business ties, which will come in handy when you want to exchange links, collaborate on projects, and do business in general. Remember, keeping yourself isolated will not help your business grow. Companies need these connections to thrive. 

5. Allow and Promote Reuse
A great deal of bloggers and websites are using images taken from Flickr. They should request your permission to use them, and as soon as you grant them permission, you should be given proper credit, hopefully with a link in return for your willingness to share.

6. Take Advantage of Stats
You may request for stats to be activated for your account. This should take 24 hours. Once you have access to your stats you’ll be able to see metrics on the overall views of your photos, but more importantly on referrals. These allow you to see who is sending traffic to your photo collections.

Flickr, combined with other Internet marketing tactics, is a fantastic tool to promote your business online.

Promote Website by 16 Ways

With billions of websites, how do I promote my website to help people find me? How Do I Promote My Website to Rank on Page One? What Are the Best Tactics to Promote My Website? These arethe questions we hear most often from professionals and small business owners. They are very important questions. More than 85% of people looking for a business use internet search. Being found should be a top priority for every business. Here are the tactics we use to promote our website and that we believe will serve you well in promoting .

1. A professionally-built and designed website
2. Keyword Research
3. Site SEO
4. PPC ads on search engines
5. Effective social media campaign, to build interest and to build incoming links to your site
6. Blog actively (and include lots of links to your site
7. Internal site links
8. Content development plan
9. Article marketing
10. Media relations campaign and regular press releases
11. Submit your site to appropriate online directories and search engines
12. Optimal use of local search
13. Effective landing pages
14. A lead generation strategy
15. Lead management system
16. Create lead bait - write or create free items that people will sign up to receive

Once you master these tactics you will know how to "promote your website." If you can learn how to do each of these tasks, or find someone who knows what they are doing, and you can weave these together into an integrated marketing and sales strategy - don't forget sales - you will be well on your way to driving quality traffic to your site, www.viv-media.com overall marketing and online marketing strategies will drive more traffic to your website and more customers to your business ，for more information pls refer to www.viv-media.com