Archive for the ‘entrepreneurs’ Category

Tracking your customers efficiently through CRM software

Friday, October 17th, 2008

You’ve launched your website, leads are contacting you through your online registration form successfully, but you can’t efficiently see how well your leads have sale closings.  What should you do?  Track them with CRM software. What is CRM software?

CRM is ‘Customer Relationship Management’ software that enables you to track customers thoroughly and see the cycle of prospect to lead to sale closings efficiently between your marketing and sales teams.  Many entrepreneurs and small companies believe that since they are small, that they are efficient in communicating between their departments, but they are wrong.  Small companies, sometime are worse that larger organizations in communicating, it’s just not as noticeable, until they start tracking for ROI growth and reviewing what direct marketing programs are working for lead generation programs.

To review clear sales user paths and improve customer satisfaction, check out a few CRM products.

Salesforce.com is one of the top CRM products on the market.  Salesforce.com has a 30-day free trial and has a pricing plan for any size company. If you are interested in having the CRM work with your current Outlook contacts, check out Prophet 5.0 (www.Avidian.com) , which has a 30 day money back guarantee and can be up and running in only a few minutes. Another good option is Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM 4.0, which you can register for free to try the product.

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B2B Marketing Secrets on Google

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

If you are a B2B marketer, you know the rising costs on Google Search is making it tougher on your bottom-line ROI numbers.  To reduce your costs and to stay within your marketing budget, check out Google Base.  Google Base is currently in beta, but it’s a great product to test out, since it’s free to list your products and services and you can link it to a store easily for processing purchases.  Google Base makes it easier for consumers to find products and services from B2B marketers that are more relevant to their searches.

Also, check out HowStuffWorks.com, if you are a marketer with products that need demonstrations. HowStuffWorks.com can create customized pages for marketers that want to brand their products and services in a non-traditional way to their target markets.  The How Stuff team will maintain the page for you with their own editorial content, which is relevant to the products and services that you are marketing.

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Posted in Ashley Hart, brand marketing, entrepreneurs, internet marketing, Media Buying, New marketers, online marketing, Search | No Comments »

How the Economy affects your Online Marketing Stategy

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Online marketing has been a cheap and effective solution comparatively to traditional media for advertisers with small budgets. The baseline for online marketing choices for advertisers have been search marketing through Google and Yahoo, display advertising through Advertising.com, and affiliate marketing through LinkShare and Commission Junction. Now, these cheap solutions are being affected by the economy, due to advertisers of all sizes looking for economical ways to maximize their ROIs because of softer sales, which causes high biddng wars in Search and increases in CPM and CPA costs for prime display advertising space.

As the U.S.  economy worsens, big budget advertisers that have used multi-channels for their marketing strategies will be forced to cut their budgets and limit their marketing channels, which makes online marketing a more attractive solution to traditional outlets. So, what can you do as a Marketer with a limited budget competing with the Big Boys?  Try alternative advertising services to the baselines.  For example, advertising networks, such as AdOnNetwork represent some of the Top ComScore sites and offer cheap remnant ad spaces for a 1/3 of the price.

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Posted in Ashley Hart, brand marketing, entrepreneurs, internet marketing, Media Buying, New marketers, online marketing, Search | No Comments »

Measuring Website Performance with Analytics

Monday, June 16th, 2008

If you are new to marketing your site on the web, then one of the most important tools that you will need is an Analytics program to gauge traffic performance to your site. Without an Analytics program, you won’t be able to know where your traffic comes from, what advertising programs are really converting at your site, or how much much your campaigns are actually costing you.

You can choose from a range of existing products on the market or you can build the analytics internally. If you don’t have the resources or cash to build your Analytics program, a fair and free alternative is Google Analytics -www.google.com/analytics Yes, you read it correctly, it’s a free product from Google, but there are some minor issues that you should be aware of, if you decide to run advertising campaigns to drive traffic from the Advertising Networks. Google does not record every ‘Unique Visitor’ to a site due to its coding language, which will not pick up. Google will under report the amount of users. Make sure to place a pixel from the Advertising Network on your homepage so you can check the Advertising Network’s reports against Google’s Analytics.

Like any other free software tool that you find on the Web, you can’t completely customize Google Analytics the way that you need, if you have a complicated eCommerce site, but for those simple marketing informational sites, it does work well. To get started, all you have to do is place the ‘pixel’ code that is given to you by Google Analytics at the end of the sign-up process into the <head> tags of each page of the site, then you’re ready to go. It’s as simple as that. It takes approximately 24 hours before the reports are populated with data.

If you do have an eCommerce website that requires a lot of analytic customization, consider Web Trends. Web Trends is a great analytics tool, but can be costly.

No matter what you choose for your Analytics program, make sure to test it against your internal logs to make sure that the traffic numbers are true numbers.

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Posted in entrepreneurs, internet marketing, Media Buying, New marketers, online marketing, Search | No Comments »