Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

Building your Email Marketing Funnel

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

Capturing email names and addresses of prospects who visit your website or blog should be high on your online marketing agenda. For most, this is the entry point to your marketing and sales funnel.

email campaign

People don’t easily give up their email addresses anymore so you need to think about the perceived value of your newsletter or ‘carrot’. If you are offering a service you can turn your expertise into a PDF guide, video or audio content based on your industry. If it is a product you’re selling you could offer a demo or a sample.

Email marketing helps remind your prospects, customers and clients that your business exists. It is much more preferable to provide them with valuable content and to build a relationship based on trust rather than a stream of sales pitches  – this will help enormously towards the success of this relationship.

Another aspect of your system you’ll want is automation. You’d certainly want the process to be automatic when someone opts in and receives your thank you/welcome email.

Not only that, but imagine a sequence of emails delivered to your subscriber, through an autoresponder, on a weekly or monthly basis all carefully tailored to engage and build trust. This whole email marketing funnel can all be set up in advance. You could do a years’ worth of newsletters if you wanted.

When you do your email marketing campaigns you need to make sure you do NOT spam people. This means that they have given you permission to email them (through opting in, networking or in some other way). You certainly will want to use a system that automatically unsubscribes anyone who no longer wants to receive your emails.

 email worldviewWith Code 9 Campaign the email marketing process is a joy to use, giving you the ability to capture emails and deliver your incentives, newsletters and email campaigns very easily.

You will have full access to data, email opens, autoresponders, automatic unsubscribes, link click activity and a lot more as standard.

You can also see your subscribers open their emails and share your content in realtime with our Worldview feature!

 

>> To find out more about eCampaign click here

Code 9 launch Code 9 Marketing

Monday, June 13th, 2011
Code 9 MarketingWe’ve recently launched a sister website to Code 9 Design to highlight and promote our online marketing services such as SEO, PPC, Social Media and Email Marketing. Code 9 Marketing Director Jerry Holliday explains, “We felt that our existing online marketing services needed some room to breath away from our main web design and branding services website.” “The Internet is changing at a rapid pace and businesses with a web presence really need to implement a coherent online strategy to stay ahead of the competition. Code 9 Marketing will continue to help our clients in this area.” Code 9 Marketing can help with website planning, design and build through to content marketing, search engine optimisation, pay per click campaigns, social media marketing and email database capture and reader engagement. Click here to have a look around the website! Contact Us if you’d like to chat about your online marketing. (No obligations or hard selling here)

Using QR codes for business

Friday, March 11th, 2011

qrcode So what are QR codes? You have probably seen them on physical product packaging, TV or websites: In fact, because they can be any size, you might also find them on billboards, business cards, park benches, clothing – in fact any object that could possibly have further information available.

QR codes can be created by a variety of free QR code generating sites, such as Kaywa, allowing you to link to a URL or that can contain a set amount of information (up to a max of 4,296 alpha-numeric characters).

This can then be opened by any user with a QR code reader or a smart-phone with a QR reader app installed. So how can you use them for your business? Well you really are only limited only by your imagination.

Let’s look at some examples of what businesses could use and are already using them for:

Website Visits: Use a QR codes on your marketing materials to drive more traffic from mobile users to your website. Discount coupons or rewards: Put a special offer QR code on your advertising, offline and online for customers to grab a secret deal.
Point of Sale: Use QR Codes on menus, price lists, and other promotional materials so your customers can scan, click, and order online.
Maps: Help your customers and prospects get to your shop with a QR code that links to an online map, leading a path to your door!

Viral In Japan a advertising screen displayed a QR code with no explanation, so naturally people checked it out of curiosity.

Expect to see a lot more of this kind of advertising. QR codes are a brilliant way of offering something special and extra to your prospects, customers and clients, so why not spend some time coming up with some promotional ideas for your QR code?

What’s Your Content Strategy for 2011?

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011
A content strategy is fast becoming more and more essential in today’s marketing arena.
With competition and noise increasing in the marketplace, especially online, unique content is the key to standing out from your competitors in the ever-changing digital landscape.
This landscape is changing with channels of communication between customers, products, services and companies blending together in the form of online content, social media and new PR, whilst the host is most likely to be the web, whether through a computer or a mobile platform.
By changing your business to becoming a trusted source of information and content you are stepping into the realm of attraction marketing rather than the outdated ‘push marketing’ strategy that has increasing limitations.
Your content, if planned out well, can be stretched by re-using a message and syndicating it through different media channels. For example a podcast can be transcribed to be a whitepaper or report, as well as re-purposed to be a blog post, article or press release.
SEO benefits
Content has high SEO benefits as well. These days SEO is not just about tweaking your website so it can be picked up by the search engines, but also the content you distribute through other platforms such as Press Release sites, Remote Blogs, Social Media, Video and Podcast platforms, which can all appear in search engine results as well.
Integrating the social web is a key part of any content strategy and by creating content that answers questions your prospects are searching for, you can engage much quicker with that prospect.
According to Covario’s study, 2011 The Year of Facebook, using social media to organically build backlinks will be a mainstream strategy in 2011.
Whatever the platform ‘valuable non-sales like content’ on the subject of your market is essential to build trust and rapport with your audience.
A content strategy is fast becoming more and more essential in today’s marketing arena. With competition and noise increasing in the marketplace, especially online, unique content is the key to standing out from your competitors in the ever-changing digital landscape. This landscape is changing with channels of communication between customers, products, services and companies blending together in the form of online content, social media and new PR, whilst the host is most likely to be the web, whether through a computer or a mobile platform. By changing your business to becoming a trusted source of information and content you are stepping into the realm of attraction marketing rather than the outdated ‘push marketing’ strategy that has increasing limitations. Your content, if planned out well, can be stretched by re-using a message and syndicating it through different media channels. For example a podcast can be transcribed to be a whitepaper or report, as well as re-purposed to be a blog post, article or press release. SEO benefits Content has high SEO benefits as well. These days SEO is not just about tweaking your website so it can be picked up by the search engines, but also the content you distribute through other platforms such as Press Release sites, Remote Blogs, Social Media, Video and Podcast platforms, which can all appear in search engine results as well. Integrating the social web is a key part of any content strategy and by creating content that answers questions your prospects are searching for, you can engage much quicker with that prospect. According to Covario’s study, 2011 The Year of Facebook, using social media to organically build backlinks will be a mainstream strategy in 2011. Whatever the platform ‘valuable non-sales like content’ on the subject of your market is essential to build trust and rapport with your audience.

Why Start an Email Newsletter?

Monday, August 16th, 2010
newsQuite often this question comes up and is something we’d encourage business owners to seriously consider as part of their online marketing strategy. Email Newsletters compliment your website or blog nicely and can drive traffic back to them and help the longevity of your customer relationships. 1. If you engage with your email list (you are building an email list aren’t you?) and offer value to it you will build trust in your brand and services. 2. Your readers may not need your services today or tomorrow, but if you regularly touch bass with them, they WILL remember you when they need you! 3. It’s very inexpensive compared to printed newsletters or papers. You can reach thousands of subscribers for mere pence per person as opposed to taking on printing, posting and fulfilment costs. 4. Email newsletters encourage word-of-mouth advertising and make it easy for your subscribers to forward your email to others and also allows you to reach people you may not have reached any other way. 5. A good Email newsletter platform will provides track-able results giving you access to information such as who clicked what link, open rates and other really interesting data!

Social Media Mistakes

Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Social Media and Social Networking can be great marketing tools for your business, but are you going about it in the right way? Here are just a few pointers. What’s Your Master plan? It is essential to have a plan before you start otherwise you will become rudderless and end of wasting a lot of time. Sit down and think through what you want to achieve with your social media message. Is it to raise your brand and business profile? Launch a new product or service? Establish yourself as an expert? Me Me Me! Your social media content is all based on YOU and YOUR BUSINESS and nothing else. Your followers might get irritated after a while and start to see your business in a negative way, especially if you’re just trying to sell. Be Social Interacting, sharing and connecting with others online is what social media is all about rather than being a broadcast system! Auto Messaging People follow you because you have something of interest to say. An automatic message saying ‘ thanks for following’ holds no real value and is just another tweet to delete. Because it is auto-generated it doesn’t appear to be genuine. Overposting Sometimes you see people have tweeted a message 8 times in a row and it doesn’t look good at all. Try to spread out your messages evenly. You bang out the same tweet/message again and again or just post one after the other. This just looks like you’re contaminating the feed.