You don’t always need a large budget to accomplish a lot. Here are a few tools to stretch your current marketing budget:
1. Unbounce.com – This site allows you to create highly customizable landing pages with out the need for coding, basically a marketer’s dream. They offer a free plan that allows you to have up to 200 visits in one month and one free domain. After that, they have incremental plans that are still very cost effective. Built-in to Unbounce is a deep A/B test abilities and integration with other programs. I highly recommend this tool.
2. Lowcostprintshop.com – Direct mail is dead???!! Doubt it! While it is not as cool as social media it can still have an impact on your bottom-line. With lowcostprintshop.com you can easily print a thousand or so pieces of collateral or DM for less than $200. They have great customer service and a great turnaround time.
3. Wordpress! – While WordPress is intended as a blogging platform it can also be easily turned into a static web page if necessary. A simple Google search will return many articles on how to do this. With many professional templates being available for free or low cost, you can have a professional looking site for your business within a few hours.
Combine your new website with the tools above and you have a lead generation machine. Feel free to contact me if you would like more info on how to effectively use these tools for your business.
On Monday I had the chance to attend the Online Marketing Summit and was glad that I did. The available courses had been broken down into three different categories, B2B, B2C and Social Media. Being that I currently work for a B2B organization, I stuck with all of the B2B classes. Here are some of the takeaways that I had from the conference:
1. Load time can affect SEO- Apparenty Amazon saw a 1% decrease in sales when load times increase by just a coupe hundred miliseconds.
2. The blink test- Display a website for two seconds and subsequently remove it. What memory do you have of the site? Whatever that is is the first imression that people have of your site. Make sue it is what you want visitors to know.
3. HTTP and HTML will become outdated- This was a prediction from of the people on the guest panel at the beginning of the conference. I found this to be a very bold statement but one that has some validity.
Overall, I found the event to be very well organized and a great place to learn about marketing. Food for the event was catered by Tom Douglas who also gave a great keynote about personal branding. Other highlights included a discussion about the changing consumer as well as about branding. The only event that I attended that I did not like was about measuring social media ROI.
The discussion lacked any overall organization or key highlights. This could have been a great educational discussion but fell short in the end. Also, the event had too much hype around social media. Many people talk about it but few gave a great discussion about. This is something that I have noticed multiple times. Until this hype around social media goes away it will not reach its true potential as part of an integrated marketing campaign.
The best part of the event was a discussion about branding. The event was hosted by agency veterans and others. It was very insightful and was great food for thought. The final keynote was from the VP of marketing at REI. His speech was interesting and a great way to end the event.
MarketMix 2010 is a must attend and I plan on doing so in the future.
Here is a video of Al Ries predicting the failure of the iPhone in 2007.
Today I would like to share a couple tools I use to monitor online presence.
Google URL builder- This allows you to build a unique URL that can be used in conjunction with Google Analytics. For example, you can use the URL that is generated in a specific place to know how many people came form that link. In the past I have used it on Twitter accounts and other social media sites to track the traffic that comes from that site.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578
Monitor Mailto links- Below is a link to a blog that details its use but the idea is that you can create a goal conversion in Google analytics for a Mailto link. With out this you would not know how many people are clicking on a mailto link. You would now be able to find out how many people click on the “email us” link and compare it to how many emails you actually get.
http://seojeff.com/2008/08/13/how-to-track-a-mailto-link-click-as-a-conversion/
This past week has been pretty exciting in the world of Google for me. Besides getting an invite for Voice and noticing the Google Analytic feature of “Intelligence”, I finally received a Google Wave invite. I have been waiting for 6 months to get an invite and was really excited to get it.
At first I found it to be a little off putting that there are so few contacts on it but the ability to invite 20 people made it more appealing. Many of these invites I offered to people at work because of the potential that Wave has for the work environment.
If Wave takes off in the work environment I see it making a big difference to the way projects are designed and executed. People in many different areas could simultaneously collaborate to share ideas but in a way that is more fluid than email and more powerful than IM.
It would be possible for a manager to collaborate and hear feedback from employees in a way that shares ideas about a project with everyone instead of a select few. Unfortunately Wave is not even at its peak yet.
The true potential of Wave lies in its open source platform that will allow developers to expand it’s potential and usefulness.
This week’s surprise announcement from Boeing is a direct result of the union working its way out of a job. The repeated arrogance of the union to overestimate their power has resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs to the Puget Sound area. For them to do this shows complete arrogance of the situation.
Boeing has offered the union fair contracts many times over and even tried to secure a ten year contract with the union in an attempt to secure a continuous work force. The union has shown complete disrespect each time and has instead viewed each strike as a couple months break. It is amazing that Boeing has lasted this long.
To put this in perspective, Boeing has viewed the problem to be big enough to forgo a skilled labor work force and instead train a new one. This is not an easy feet when you consider they are building a revolutionary plane that is still having technical difficulties.
To make the situation worse, the Washington State government made no attempt to secure Boeing to the region while South Carolina made a serious tax break for Boeing. What has our government done? Tax Boeing every chance they get. The state made Boeing pay for much of the infrastructure that was needed to accommodate Boeing with out considering the benefit the Boeing has on the region.
The new plant in Boeing is likely have issues of its own. Their is nothing stopping the formation of a new union in S.C. to harass Boeing. Also, they are going to have serious quality issues with the planes built in S.C.
While unions have served their purpose in the past they have gained too much strength as evident by this situation. If it was not for unions we would not have a 40 hour work week, etc… but now the Puget Sound will have less jobs.