Ideas and Concepts from Damian Davila
When you’re a struggling entrepreneur, your business takes over your world as you try to boost your brand and broaden your customer base. Past entrepreneurs used to rely on traditional marketing, such as billboard or newspaper advertising, but today’s platform resides squarely on social media. From “liking” a company to “following” it, consumers are closer than ever to favorite businesses. You simply need to get your business into the online discussion world with a few key strategies.
As an online marketer I get contacted on a daily basis by potential clients from around the world. A common denominator among them is that they are looking for a quick solution to an urgent problem:
The answer to all of these questions is: “Yes, I can.” However, these are two perfect examples of what healthy Internet marketing strategies are NOT. Chris, Kilbourn, Founder and CEO of Utah-based Tofu Marketing, explains it well: “You’ll never hear us throw around the term ‘traffic’ as though it is the be-all and end-all of Internet marketing. Instead, we are an online marketing agency that focuses on sending qualified leads to your website.” He adds: “We understand that 10 qualified leads are worth more to you than 10,000 or even 10,000,000 totally unqualified visitors.”
The two scenarios are asking for “unhealthy” solutions: quick fixes that will do a lot of harm in the future. In this article let’s discuss about how to develop healthier Internet marketing strategies for each one.
Continue reading “The Importance of Healthy Internet Marketing Strategies”
This is a guest post by Ben Hook, a search engine marketer and owner of UK based online marketing company, Navaro.
Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Engineering’s comment that approximately 20 – 25% of searches performed each day are completely new queries helps to highlight the increasing need to understand how your customers are going to be looking for your products or services on the long tail of searches.
Keyword research is essential to any search engine optimization campaign. It helps ensure the time and effort put in to attain those high rankings pays off with an increase in the amount of conversions received. The main focus of keyword research though, is to highlight the most rewarding keywords to focus on in terms of traffic driven, a job they do to the best of their ability.
A MBA degree is a highly coveted degree for online marketing practitioners because it backs up our professional practice. However, throughout our MBA education we are hardly exposed to a field that is very relevant to our practice: online education, also known as educational technology.
The field of Educational Technology (ET) explores the potential use and impact of learning technologies in a variety of contexts, and determines good practices of curriculum design and technology integration.
Educational technology programs such as the Master of Educational Technology at the University of British Columbia provide learning opportunities in:
Welcome back!
Back in January 2009, I ran a post about Facebook Ads because I believe this is a great online marketing tool. This post was titled “How to target your audience using Facebook Advertising” and it touched on how to get started with an online ad.
At the end of February 2009, Facebook launched Pages as a way to allow businesses and brands to strengthen their online image on Facebook and increase the potential interaction with Facebook users.
A Facebook Page looks very much like a regular Facebook Profile and there are several organizations and business that have one.
For example, here’s the AT&T Facebook Page:
…and here’s the Facebook Page from my MBA school, the Shidler College of Business:
The difference between a regular Facebook profile and a Facebook Page is that instead of becoming a friend of a brand/organization/company, you become a fan. A well-thought feature is that brand/organization/company CANNOT add friends. This is a great practice of permission marketing because it forces users to really think whether they want to become a “fan” or not of a brand/organization/company. Therefore, the “fan” gives permission to the brand/organization/company to contact him or her, making communications personal, relevant and anticipated (the 3 pillars of permission marketing).
This is all fine, but why is the title of this post called “How to target your audience using Facebook Pages”? The answer is: Facebook Pages gives you key insights into the gender and age range of your fans. Yes, there are other nice features like number of pageviews, comments, video views and more, but the key insight is gender and age. Below is a screenshot of Facebook Pages Insight:
Having the age range and gender of your bulk of fans will allow you to tweak your Facebook Advertising campaign.
Thank you for your time and best of luck in your permission marketing campaigns!
For the last week, I have been pretty busy creating and tweaking online ads at Google Adwords and Facebook Ads, so I thought it would be useful to provide a bit of advice from my personal experience using Facebook Ads.
Why did I choose Facebook Ads? Consider the following bar graph from Venture Beat’s article titled Facebook’s traffic growth leaving rivals in the dust.
For simplicity, I will assume that you want to drive visitors to a single website.
It is important that you have a variety of images available because you will be needing as you A/B test your ads. Notice that Facebook users can give your ad a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to your ad! Don’t try to fully capitalize words (e.g. FREE), or use strange characters (keep to the regular alphabet, both using different languages is ok, actually I encourage it!). Remember to use proper punctuation, otherwise your ad won’t be approved. 
Wow, this is a lot of useful information! Notice that we get a couple of relevant news that show what drove queries for this term. Company names and product names are useful because then you can go into their websites and see what are their current SEO and SEM practices. Also, you should look if the already have ads around Facebook. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel and keep an eye on the current practices of your competitors. It is also important to check out what keywords are related to your keyword, what regions (or countries or cities) provide the most queries for your keyword, and what languages are those queries made on. Another important source of information is Google Ad Planner. For a discussion on how to use Google Ad Planner, refer to this web analytics analysis of Flickr, Photobucket, Shutterlfly, Snapfish, and Slide using Google Ad Planner.
Using the information from the previous steps, you can fill in the fields on step 3. Notice that not all keywords are available at Facebook, so its important that you look for keywords related to your own keyword(s) of choice.That’s it for now and happy experimenting with Facebook Ads!
