According to Experian, every $1 spent on e-mail marketing returns an average of $44.25. It’s one of the most effective, measurable and scalable marketing channels available to your business.
But not all e-mails are created equal.
Social Media
Marketing in the modern era has evolved into a system of agile communication, which is largely represented by social media. Sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus provide platforms for sharing information with a vast audience. By leveraging these micro-blogging sites, it is possible to reap amazing returns on your investment. Use of these and other User Created Content (UCC) networking sites enables guerilla marketing to take on epic proportions. A broad-spectrum approach to building a buzz with all the most popular social media providers can result in exposing millions of people to your brand in a very short time.
Facebook is the site that virtually coined the phrase “social network.” One of the web’s most popular destinations worldwide, it allows users to create networks of friends and contacts, share photos, videos, and links, and organize events.
A Tower Amidst a City: Why Digital Branding is Critical
Digital branding is an absolute must in today’s web driven world, especially as a small business. Every day flooded by advertisements and images at all turns, the consumer can be hard to reach and even harder to get to pay attention to something. Ultimately name recognition is the most powerful tool in the business-building arsenal and social media is a potent means with which to use it successfully. It’s easy to think of digital branding as simply being a logo or name with which people associate. The reality is social media outlets give that logo or name the ability to do something more than sit at a physical location or appear on television. Powerhouse corporations have gone to great lengths and come up with very innovative stratagems for achieving this, but the seeming limitations a small business might encounter offer something corporations can never achieve in the same way: Intimacy. Small businesses are driven by the face-to-face and personal touch. Taking advantage of that aspect of a company’s structure can yield great results with digital branding.
Professional people who are looking for career growth and networking opportunities can benefit from registering on Linked In. Rather than offering social connections, Linked In is a site for career-minded individuals who want to post their credentials, experience, and skills for the purpose of forming business connections and establishing a professional network.
Twitter is one of the most successful social media platforms on the web, with millions of users from all walks of life. Twitter allows users to send messages to their feed of 140 characters or less, and takes advantage of a ‘hashtag’ (#) system that brands specific words. The most popular hashtags are considered to be trending and are displayed on the side of a Twitter user’s newsfeed. Operating similar to an RSS feed, Twitter is fast-paced, but if used correctly, can reach millions of people.
Google +
Google + is a social network, created by Google, that is very similar to Facebook. While similar, it has features that make it different. Within Google + is an application known as Google Circles. This is a handy application that allows users to form groups that share information only among members of that group.
Webmaster Tools
When it comes to improving the performance of your eCommerce business, you should consider leveraging the power of webmaster tools. Some of the best webmaster tools available online at this time are Google’s webmaster tools, Yahoo’s Site Explorer webmaster tools, and Live.com’s webmaster tools.
How To Improve Your Website Using Webmaster Tools
Yahoo! Site Explorer
Yahoo! Site Explorer is an excellent business tool that has recently been merged with Bing’s Webmaster Tools to provide added efficiency. The goal of the site explorer is to increase the traffic flow to a business website. Many small and unknown businesses have trouble increasing the flow of their desired clientele to their websites, and they lack the funds to buy expensive website advertisements. Yahoo! Site Explorer solves this problem by redirecting traffic to a business website.
Google Webmaster
Google Webmaster Tools is a suite of online tools by Google made to help webmasters get their sites optimized and presented in an attractive and easy to use manner on search engines. Tools include structured data tagging and HTML checking, checking up on site links, keyword tools, crawling tools, a search engine for your site, geotagging, and other useful features for small businesses on the web. Search engine appearance can be previewed from Google Webmaster Tools, so you don’t need to wait for your site to be crawled by Google before you can see what it looks like on the search rank page.