Bond Products Shares its Top 5 Marketing Techniques (part 2)
…continued
Third, as part of our effort to maximize the potential of the contact information mentioned above, we’ve implemented a regular email marketing campaign that allows us to communicate with and reward our customers. For this, we use Mailchimp, a simple and free tool (free up to 2,000 subscribers, then reasonably priced after). Mailchimp is an all-in-one tool that allows us to store, access and manage our mailing lists, create and edit our email newsletters, deliver them to our customer and prospect lists and then track the success metrics of each individual campaign. Though we aren’t marketing gurus, we are able to understand and tweak our email marketing efforts and measure the results through this one great online marketing tool. If you are fortunate enough to build a solid email marketing list, this should definitely be a part of your overall marketing plan.
Fourth, we’ve become increasingly aware of the value of social media. In a global online world that is becoming more locally networked, personal recommendations and social mentions are more and more important to online business success. To make sure we are part of this global conversation, we have secured our own Facebook and Twitter profiles, and we regularly use them to reach out to our “followers”. Not only is this a great way to speak to a large audience, but it’s also a great way to maintain a personal relationship with a group of like-minded individuals who might be a half a world away. We think it’s interesting that something as simple and elegant as social media is actually helping to take a geographically boundless group of people and keep them connected, and can personally attest to the value of your investment in this technique. The important thing when it comes to social media is to make sure your “messages” are insightful and personal (never self-serving). As with all opt-in marketing, you shouldn’t spam those who are offering you their attention.
Finally, we’ve been using pay-per-click marketing, learning first-hand why Google Adwords is the top platform for online advertising. It is completely customizable, and incredibly powerful and precise in the way that it allows you to create, schedule and deliver your ads – down to the point that we can run an ad between certain hours on certain days of the week to a specific geographic region using specific media tools (we’re not kidding!). This means that we can control our advertising budget like never before imagined. While there are certainly any number of best practices out there regarding when, where, how, why and what to do with your ad campaigns, we’ve found that it’s best to use the test and tweak tools offered by Adwords to get the optimum results. With all of the parameters and the instant reaction of Google behind you, it’s easy to let the results dictate your own best practices. The key to all PPC marketing is never stop trying to improve your results.
Well, there you have it, the top 5 online marketing tools and techniques that we’ve found over the last year. If you start with #1 and work your way through them, testing and evaluating at every turn (again, the tools themselves make this really easy), you will no doubt start to see some impressive results for yourself. The worst thing you can do is ignore the evolution and power of the web as a means to reach out and develop relationships with your marketplace!
