Showing posts with label Sales and Marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sales and Marketing. Show all posts

social media monitoring for business

a screen grab from Radian6

A five-step strategy that companies should apply when entering the realm of social media according to Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6 :
Step 1 is listening. Your brand becomes the sum of the conversations about your company.
Step 2 is where you move to the responding stage. “You need to let people know that you’re listening”,
Step 3 is where you move into full participation once you understand what your customers are saying about you.
Step 4 is the stage in which you tell your story. “You give people a glimpse into the passion behind your vision and the people behind your company”,
Step 5 is where you take a broader look at your company’s place in the sector and “start contributing value to the kinds of things your community cares about”.

To succeed in today’s interconnected world, you need to listen to what your supporters and customers are saying about you.Social media has blown apart yesterday’s top-down communication funnel and replaced it with a peer-to-peer model of empowered citizens and producers. People are tiring of mass media and prefer to listen to their peers’ recommendations about products, services and causes. It’s no longer just about driving people to your website. Today the action revolves around a complex set of social conversations outside of your control — but not outside of your influence. Even the most technically unsophisticated users can now use social tools to spread their messages with unprecedented ease. So what are they saying about you?

Some people confuse monitoring with metrics. For our purposes, monitoring refers to tracking the conversations people are having about you; metrics refers to measuring the impact you’re having by tabulating such things as visits, tweets, registrations, donations and so on. Monitoring informs the metrics process.

Listening is only one step in the process of engaging with your supporters or customers. Other steps in  your social program might include the following: monitoring; setting business goals; creating and tracking metrics, and incorporating learnings from your listening and metrics efforts into your operation. You’ll want to share your learnings with marketing, sales and your organization’s version of product development or R&D.

10 reasons to listen to social media conversations

1. Assess overall sentiment. In the main, do people know what your organization is about? Do they like your goal but not how you’re going about it? Do they love your platform but don’t connect emotionally to your cause? Take the temperature of the room!

2. Target new stakeholders. Can you do a better job getting one of your offerings across to a new audience that’s only loosely connected with your organization? What are their particular interests and motivations? Is there a potential to build a new vertical or niche community around your service or cause?

3. Identify your champions. Do you know who your brand’s strongest advocates and evangelists are? How are you rewarding or engaging with them? Particularly with a new brand or campaign, you’ll want to reach out to these leading voices and influencers who can help spread an opinion about a brand faster than your own website can.

4. Identify your critics & fend off crises. Your reputation could be jeopardized by criticism — warranted or not, true or not — taking place on the social Web. You need to swoop in and respond in a positive manner, correcting any errors of fact and demonstrating problem-solving abilities, before misperceptions harden into negative sentiment. This is also a critical step in warding off PR disasters. And your critics aren’t always wrong. Adds Liz Strauss: “Listen for the things that you don’t want to hear” and learn from them.

5. Audit your efforts. At some point you’ll want to step back and do an assessment of your social media channels. What’s working? What’s not worth the staff’s time? Monitoring tied to metrics will tell you.

6. Study the success stories. What resonates with your users? Do you have a good sense of what pages on your site, which blog posts, which Facebook postings, Flickr sets or YouTube videos — by your team or by others in your sector — are causing the most stir and generating the most interest? Track what’s working and emulate the best features.

7. Identify new program or product opportunities. Brands are beginning to realize the value that users can offer about their programs, products, services and campaigns. To some extent, the social Web is the new focus group — only free, larger and instantaneous. Social media can help you to stay abreast of the latest development in your sector and to use that business intelligence to inform your organization’s product or program roadmap.

8. Identify donors or lower costs. Business development and sales teams are increasingly turning to the social Web for sales leads and business prospects. Nonprofits are beginning to use social media to track potential donors and new sources of funding. Businesses, meantime, are reducing internal costs by employing online services that save time and effort.

9. Keep tabs on competitors. What’s the competition up to? Today it’s easier than ever to monitor your sector or industry to find out about a new competitor, to get an early warning about competing brands’ strategic moves or to take advantage of the public’s dissatisfaction with a competitor’s product or service.

10. Improve your campaigns and programs. Are you launching focused efforts to move the needle for your organization? Track the mentions of your brand on social networks before, during and after a campaign to see what’s resonating. Use social media’s feedback loop to improve implementation of your programs.

What to listen for: Insights from your community
Community Insights Checklist
  • What do people like or not like about our brand, cause or organization?
  • What are their complaints, and what are the best channels to address them?
  • Who are our champions and evangelists? How do we entreat them to become even more involved?
  • Are there perpetual detractors about our brand that we can turn around?
  • Is there a need in the marketplace or in our sector that we can fill?
  • How can our community help inform our new offering, service or product?
  • What suggestions do they have to help us improve our next fundraising campaign?
  • Are there ways to crowdsource some of what we do to decrease the strain on our staff?
  • What existing outside communities can we tap into? What partnerships can we strike?
  • Can we use stories in our public outreach based on some of the community members we’ve touched or helped?
  • Bottom line: How can we use these insights to drive our mission forward?
Keywords Checklist
  • Organization’s name
  • Name of your chief executive or other individuals associated with your organization
  • Names of key services, programs or brands
  • Name and url of your blog or online community
  • Name of key events you put on or attend
  • Names of key terms or phrases in the sector
  • Names of your competitors or other organizations in your space
  • Anything else that’s distinctive to your mission or business objective
There are a wealth of free monitoring tools to choose from.
Free monitoring tools may fill your needs if you work for a small nonprofit or your business has no need for more sophisticated services (coming tomorrow). Just remember: Free monitoring tools aren’t really free — they require an investment of staff time and analysis.

And a word of advice: Don’t begin with the tools. Begin with a strategy — a social media game plan. Think of this as a multi-step process: Listen, learn, engage, act and measure. Listening is only the first step — you need to take action on what you discover.

Monitor social campaigns :

Wildfire: How is your brand performing in social?

1. Wildfire, a startup focused on creating interactive promotions on social sites, last month launched Social Media Monitor, a tool that tracks and compares how brands are performing on Facebook and Twitter. Wildfire allows companies, small businesses, marketing agencies, nonprofits and bloggers to create their own branded interactive campaigns — including contests, giveaways, incentive-based surveys and sweepstakes — and to simultaneously publish them in multiple social networks and on their websites. More than 65,000 users have done so. As we understand this, the basic tools are free and Wildfire also sells premium services.

Monitor social networks & blogs :

Social Mention: Widgets & social search

2. Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches for keywords on social media platforms — including blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos and microblogging services — and provides metrics around keywords and “sentiment.” It also provides graphic illustrations or charts showing mentions per day or week. Download the free search bar for your browser and monitor anything from your brand to your cause. They also offer APIs and provide coding for your own keyword monitoring widgets.

Alternative:
• Collecta lets you enter any search term to receive real-time results for mentions in social media, in blog comments and on news sites.

Google Reader: Begin with a dashboard

3. Social media monitoring begins with a dashboard. (See our Top 10 social media dashboard tools.) A good choice to begin your monitoring is Google Reader: Subscribe to the RSS feeds of top blogs in your sector, competitors’ sites, news sites, Twitter searches and more, all in one place. You can even subscribe to searches on sites like Flickr and YouTube, so you’ll get an update on any new image or video that matches your brand or cause. If the page you’re on doesn’t seem to have an RSS feed, try Feedyes.com. We also like Feed Informer, which lets you splice multiple feeds together into one and filter for duplicates.

Alternatives: Bloglines, Netvibes.

BlogPulse: Take the pulse of the blogosphere

4. BlogPulse from NM Incite is an automated trend discovery system for blogs that analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere. You can keep on top of key phrases, top blog posts, videos, key people news sources and more. But its real power lies in the options you have to track blog conversations based on topics or keywords. See which blogs, news posts, etc., are fueling the most conversations about your brand online.

Other blog monitoring services that should be in your arsenal:
• Technorati
• Google Advanced Blog Search
• IceRocket

Alltop: Identify the top blogs in your sector

5. Alltop, Guy Kawasaki’s online magazine rack – or, more precisely, topic-based directory — lets you search for influential blogs in a given niche or subject. Add the feeds to your RSS reader and you have a more targeted monitoring process.

Monitor Twitter & Facebook :

Hootsuite: Simplify your social efforts

6. We’re fans of Hootsuite as a free tool that enables nonprofits and cause organizations to update multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook) from a computer or mobile device. The free version lets you work with up to five social networks and two RSS feeds but is limited to one user for your organization’s account; it stores stat history for 30 days and is ad supported. For the paid version, see 10 paid social media monitoring services for nonprofits.

Alternatives:
• Tweetdeck
• Seesmic
• Cotweet

Twitter search options

7. If Hootsuite or one of the other Twitter dashboard services doesn’t meet your needs, you have lots of other options to keep tabs on the Twitterverse. Here are a few:

  • Twitter Advanced Search is the best way to ferret out tweets about a targeted sector. Look for keywords, search by location, date or with other filters.
  • Track is a little-known Twitter feature that lets you track keywords and have them sent directly to your mobile phone as soon as they’re posted.
  • Monitter lets you monitor Twitter for key words, phrases and topics being discussed online at a glance (though we still prefer Hootsuite for this).
  • Twazzup is a dashboard program that monitors Twitter, Twazzup will let you know wheneer your keywords are mentioned in a tweet.
  • PostRank analytics lets you uncover your influencers, identify which social networks give you the greatest traction and benchmark yourself against the competition.
  • Pulse of the Tweeters uses data mining and sentiment analysis to mine millions of tweets and find the most influential people on Twitter around your cause or sector.
  • Twitscoop lets you search and follow what’s buzzing on Twitter in real time.
  • Twilert sends you emails when it sees keywords on Twitter that you specify.
  • Sideline from Yahoo! allows users to create and group custom queries by topics of interest.
  • PeerIndex is another option to help you discover authorities and opinion makers around a particular topic.
  • MyTweeple checks out your Twitter account and analyzes who is following you back — a good way to monitor reciprocal relationships.
  • MentionMap is a visualizer tool that lets you assess the most influential Twitter users in various sectors.
  • Twitterfall is a great way to keep up on conversations about an event, or an online chat, using hashtags. You can also use its geolocation panel to see discussions in a geographic area.

Facebook Search: Explore FB conversations

8. There are rich conversations taking place about your sector on Facebook right now. So don’t overlook Facebook Search as a monitoring tool. Unearth the people on Facebook who are talking about your brand or cause. Use the Facebook search field and then choose “Posts by Everyone” in the left navigation. You may find new Pages to Like and new people to interact with.

• Openbook may also be useful in turning up mentions of your brand in Facebook status updates.

Monitor upcoming events :

Plancast: Stay on top of upcoming events

9. Like many of my colleagues, I’ve ditched Yahoo’s Upcoming and moved to Plancast. You can subscribe to get an RSS alert on any new event that matches keywords you select. Keep track of events thrown by your competitors, or stay on top of conferences you may want to attend or co-sponsor.

Monitor with alerts :

Google Alerts: Your real-time personal assistant

10. Nearly every plugged-in user these days knows about Google Alerts. When Google’s vast army of bots discover a new blog entry or news story that contains a keyword or phrase you specify, it will send you an alert in a time frame you designate: immediately, daily or weekly. What’s more, you can receive alerts via feeds sent to your RSS reader. Enter the topic you want to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you’ll receive. Keep current on your brand, cause, sector or industry — and, of course, mentions of your own name. Also keep in mind that Google Alerts tracks only content indexed by Google.

Related:
• A new service, Google Realtime Search, lets you search the social Web (chiefly Twitter) and create email alerts for search terms.
• TweetBeep is sort of a Google Alert for Twitter. It uses search.twitter.com site for mentions of up to 10 keywords or phrases you specify and will send you emails.

BackType: Track comments & influencers

11. BackType Alerts is a free service that sends you email updates whenever a search term is mentioned in a comment. Somebody trash your brand in a blog comment? You’ll want to know right away. BackType will also show you your Twitter influencers who are sharing related links.

Update: BackType was acquired by Twitter in 2011 and is now closed.

Yahoo Pipes: Mash up your content feeds


12. Yahoo Pipes is a powerful tool that lets you aggregate and remix content from anywhere online. Its visual interface makes it fairly easy to use. You can use it in innumerable ways — for example, to track Twitter for mentions of your brand, to monitor multiple feeds or to alert you only when feed activity meets a certain activity threshold. For a good example of Yahoo Pipes in action, look at this Social Media Firehose tool, which lets you track your brand or product mentions across a slew of social media sites.

Northern Light: Roll your own search alerts


13. Remember the days when editorial filtering counted for something? Northern Light Search has been around forever, it seems. A business research tool, it indexes more than 800 news sources and publications, like the Wall Street Journal and PBS NewsHour, and some 1,600 authoritative industry blogs. They write: “We have editorially honed the content to include only business sources and to exclude the shopping and other consumer sites that clog your results on other search engines.” It offers support for full Boolean queries as well as saved search and alerting capabilities. You can create Search Alerts via email or RSS to help you track subjects you care about.

Monitor with social search :

Addict-o-matic: Check the buzz about a topic

14. Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a custom page with the latest buzz on a given topic. The browser-based tool offers a one-stop customized site for seeing results across multiple social media channels.

Alternatives:
• Guzzle reads hundreds of feeds on social media sites every second to help you keep abreast of stuff you care about.
• Buzzoo is a buzz aggregator drawing from multiple sources.
• BuzzFeed sports a robust buzz-detection algorithm.
• Twendz, a free tool from Waggener Edstrom, piggybacks off Twitter Search to offer user sentiment in real time.
• Social Seek will tell you who’s making the most noise about your brand.
• How Socialble? sizes up how visible your brand is on the social Web.
• Mon.itor.us is a free website, server and traffic monitoring service.
• See more choices under Twitter, above.


MonitorThis: Browse 26 search engines

15. 77elements’ monitorThis is a meta-search engine (remember those?) that let you comb through 26 search engines to look for blog posts, news articles, photos, tags and tweets on a specific subject. You may be surprised by some of the results on the more obscure search engines.

Alternative:
• Keotag lets you search multiple search engines, create social bookmark links around a topic or see who has used your brand as a tag.

Monitor comments & forums :

Comment Sniper: First mover advantage

16. If you have the staff to help manage your brand’s reputation in a deep way, then Comment Sniper is worth a look. Comment Sniper offers you a way to build targeted traffic to your site at no cost by giving you the opportunity to be the first to comment on relevant blog posts about your brand or sector. You set up blogs you want to monitor, and Comment Sniper sends you a desktop notification or text message to your mobile device whenever a new post goes up. Check this tutorial on how to make the process more efficient.

coComment: Keep track of conversations

17. coComment is a Web service and Firefox plug-in that helps you keep track of blog comment threads. Whenever there is an update, such as a new follow-up comment, coComment notifies you instantly. It’s a handy service that saves you the trouble of checking back on blogs that don’t offer a comment notification feature.

Alternatives:
• Commentful is another Web service that helps you keep track of blog comments.
• Omgili (Oh my God I love it) forum search engine lets you find communities, message boards and discussion threads about any topic.
• co.mments helps you keep track of conversations.

BoardReader: Monitoring 50,000 forums

18. Not all forums and message boards are indexed by Google. BoardReader is a community search engine that crawls forums, blog posts, images and microblogs. It’ll also let you know when a new forum starts specifically to discuss your brand or organization.

Other forum search & alert tools:
• Boardtracker
• Big Boards
• Yuku Find

Monitor trends:

Google Trends: Take the long view

19. Google Trends gives you a measurement of the impact that bloggers or a campaign has on a brand. The tool measures the level of interest in specific topics based on searches people conduct over a period of time. One interesting facet is that you can compare multiple sites in the same sector and see the geographic regions where a keyword is most popular.

Related: With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and other properties.

Other choices:

• Trendpedia blog search from Attentio
• Social Trends from Viralheat

Monitor Web pages :

WatchThatPage: Keep a watchful eye

20. Sometimes you’d like to know when updates take place to an important Web page — say, your Wikipedia page or key pages on your competitors’ sites. Instruct WatchThatPage to keep tabs on any Web page, and you’ll receive an alert any time a change is made to the page.

Alternative: Copernic Tracker ($40)

 

Social media monitoring vendors come in all shapes and flavors. Some cater to small business with modest budgets that want to handle monitoring analysis internally. Others service global corporations that want access to expert analysts as well as a robust suite of social tools that plug into business processes. And here is the guidance of the Top 20 Social Media Monitoring Vendors for Business:

Radian6: A proven solution for big brands
1. Canada-based Radian 6 works with brands to help them listen more intelligently to your consumers, competitors and influencers with the goal of growing your business via detailed, real-time insights. Beyond their monitoring dashboard, which tracks mentions on more than 100 million social media sites, they offer an engagement console that allows you to coordinate your internal responses to external activity by immediately updating your blog and Twitter and Facebook accounts all in one spot. Fully automated. Cost: The dashboard starts at $600/month, though registered nonprofits can apply for two free uses per year under the company’s Giving Back program. They also offer free trials to students and educators for research and project purposes. Radian6 uses a monthly subscription based pricing model, with the monthly fee varying depending on the number of topics monitored each month. Clients: Red Cross, Adobe, AAA, Cirque du Soleil, H&R Block, March of Dimes, Microsoft, Pepsi, Southwest Airlines — a wide range of clients. Owner: Independent.

Collective Intellect: Social media intelligence gathering
2. Boulder, Colo.-based Collective Intellect, which started out by providing monitoring to financial firms, has evolved into a top-tier player in the marketplace of social media intelligence gathering. Using a combination of self-serve client dashboards and human analysis, Collective Intellect offers a robust monitoring and measurement tool suited to mid-size to large companies with its Social CRM Insights platform. It applies spam management techniques and text analysis to clean data sets, delivering customers rich intelligence.Cost: Pricing starts at $300/month and scales based on specific client needs, according to published reports. Clients: General Mills, NBC Universal, Pepsi, Walmart, Unilever, Advertising Age, CBS, Dole, MTV Networks, MillerCoors, Paramount, Verizon Wireless, Viacom, Hasbro, Siemens. Owner: Independent.

Lithium: Adjust your campaign on the fly
3. Lithium monitors your search-specific mentions and sentiment in social media outlets and outputs them into easy-to-read graphs and numbers resembling the stock market. Lithium will aggregate information from a variety of platforms including blog posts and comments, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and many others, and it’ll assess emotions surrounding your brand pre-, mid- and post campaign so you can adjust your strategies accordingly. We miss ScoutLabs, which is now part of Lithium. Cost: Base plan of $249/month for five users and five searches. Free 14-day trial. Clients: Best Buy, BT, Barnes & Noble, FICO, Disney Online, Stubhub, Motorola, Coca Cola, Focus Features, Netflix. Owner: Independent. Lithium bought ScoutLabs in May 2010.

Sysomos: Manage conversations in real time
4. Sysomos’s Heartbeat is a real-time monitoring and measurement tool that provides constantly updated snapshots of social media conversations delivered using a variety of user-friendly graphics. Heartbeat organizes conversations, manages workflow, facilitates collaboration and provides ways to engage with key influencers. For more, see ReadWrite review. Sysomos also offers a Media Analysis Platform. Cost: Entry-level price of $500/month. Clients: IBM, HSBC, Roche, Ketchum, Sony Ericsson, Philips, ConAgra, Edelman, Shell Oil, Nokia, Sapient, Citi, Interbrand. Owner: Marketwire.

Attensity360: Actionable insights
5. Attensity360 operates on four key principles: listen, analyze, relate, act. Attensity360 will help monitor trending topics, influencers and the reach of your brand while recommending ways to join the conversation. Attensity Analyze applies text analytics to unstructured text to extract meaning and uncover trends. Attensity Respond helps automate the routing of incoming social media mentions into user-defined queues. Cost: $399/month for one license. Discounts for longer subscriptions. Free 15-day trial. Clients: Whirlpool, Vodofone, Versatel, TMobile, Oracle, Wiley. Owner: Independent. Attensity bought Biz360 in spring 2010.

Alterian SM2: Providing daily brand sentiment
6. UK-based Alterian SM2 tracks mentions on blogs, forums, social networks like Facebook, microblogs like Twitter, wikis, video and photo sharing sites, Craigslist and ePinions. SM2 monitors the daily volume, demographics, location, tone and emotion of conversations surrounding a brand and aggregates results into positive and negative categories for quick review by anyone on staff. Cost: Pricing is based on volume of results and ranges from $500/month to $15,000/month. “Freemium” trial plan allows for five keyword or phrase searches and a total of 1,000 results. Alterian also provides additional custom solutions. Clients: Rosetta, MDAnderson, Pursuit, YouCast. Owner: Independent. Alterian bought Techrigy in July 2009.

Crimson Hexagon: Actionable data for your business
7. Cambridge, Mass.-based Crimson Hexagon taps into billions of conversations taking place in online media and turns them into actionable data for better brand understanding and improvement. Based on a technology licensed from Harvard, its VoxTrot Opinion is able to analyze vast amounts of qualitative information and determine quantitative proportion of opinion. Cost: Pricing based on number of seats or number of searches. Clients: CNN, Hanes, AT&T, HP, Johnson & Johnson, Mashable, Microsoft, Monster, AdWeek, Thomson Reuters, Rubbermaid, Sybase, the Huffington Post, A&E, the Wall Street Journal. Owner: Independent.

Spiral16: Flexible pricing, competitive analysis
8. Spiral16 takes an in-depth look at who is saying what about a brand and compares results with those of top competitors. The goal is to help you monitor the effectiveness of your social media strategy, understand the sentiment behind conversations online and mine large amounts of data. It uses impressive 3D displays and a standard dashboard. Cost: Pricing starts at $500 for five queries or Internet searches, though there is no solid pricing model and Spiral16 will work with companies to tailor plans that fit their budget. Online demo available. Clients: Toyota, Lee, Cadbury. Owner: Independent.

Webtrends: Mobile & social analytics
9. Webtrends offers services geared toward monitoring, measuring, analyzing, profiling and targeting audiences for a brand. The partner-based platform allows for crowd-sourced improvements and problem solving, creating transparency of their products and services. Cost: Pricing varies depending on packages and services chosen, but Webtrends is geared to big players. Social Accelerator packages start at $15,000/year, app packages start at $1,500 to $12,000/year. Clients: CBS, NBC Universal, 20th Century Fox, AOL, Electronic Arts, Lifetime, AA, Glam, Nestle, the City of Calgary. Owner: Independent.

Spredfast: Campaign & social media management
10. We weren’t sure whether to include Spredfast in this Top 20 roundup because of its versatility. it’s not only a monitoring service but a social media management, measurement and campaign tool — in other words, a full-on social media dashboard and integrated communications client (Threadsy is another). In the end, Spredfast made the cut because you can pull relevant conversations from multiple networks into your dashboard, track referrals and conversions, summon up analytics and jump straight to analysis and reports. See our recent full review. Cost: Pricing begins at $250/month for businesses. Clients: AOL, Nokia, IBM, Sierra Club. Owner: Independent start-up.

NM Incite: Going for depth
11. Global brands look to NM Incite‘s expertise across marketing, sales, product development, customer service, business strategy development and in deep verticals for monitoring and social media intelligence. This is a service geared to multinationals rather than nonprofits or mid-size companies. Cost: Five figures is typical. Clients: Toyota, ConAgra, Intel, Sony, Nokia, AOL, HBO, Barclays, Whirlpool, GE, Discovery, Coca-Cola. Owner: NM Incite is a joint venture of the Nielson Co. and McKinsey & Co. Nielsen Buzzmetrics was spun off into NM Incite as part of its launch in June 2010.

Converseon: Tech + human analysts
12. New York-based social-media consulting firm Converseon, named a leader in the social media monitoring sector by Forrester Research, builds tailored dashboards for its enterprise installations and offers professional services around every step of the social business intelligence process. Converseon starts with the technology and adds human analysis, resulting in high-quality data and impressive functionality. Cost: Pricey. Cost varies according to which suite is used. Clients: Dow, Amway, Graco, other major brands. Converseon has more than 200,000 customers and 10,000 channel partners in 100 countries. Owner: Independent.

dna13: An emphasis on simplicity
13. Ottawa-based dna13‘s MediaVantage will monitor all of your media coverage and present it in an easy-to-read format allowing you to respond from one platform. dna13 provides on-demand software solutions for brand and reputation management, including a PR and corporate communications software suite and a monitoring service for real-time insight into brand, reputation, competitors and industry issues. Cost: Packages start at $560/month. Initial $500 set-up fee. Clients: Wachovia, Miami Heat. Owner: CNW Group Co.

Attentio
14. 5-year-old Belgium-based Attentio tracks global conversations taking place across social media (blogs, forums, social networks, Twitter, YouTube) and online news sites. The multilingual service offers brand reputation management, campaign/product release impact, sales opportunity tracking and sentiment analysis along with a dashboard to track media in real time. Cost: Pricing starts at £500 ($775 US) per month for a one-year subscription; costs for tailored reports begin at £5,000 ($7,750) . Clients: Johnson & Johnson, Skype, Microsoft, Disney. Owner: Independent.

Visible Technologies: High-end monitoring & analysis
15. In the fall 2010 Visible Technologies replaced its truCAST technology with Visible Intelligence, its new enterprise social intelligence platform and services. The new platform helps clients monitor, analyze and participate in social media conversations as well as protect their executive and corporate brands online. Visible adds analyst support to their client servicing to help you understand the landscape and determine which intelligence to act on. Arrange a demo via @Visible_Tech on Twitter. Cost: Typically $25,000 to $45,000, according to press reports. Clients: Microsoft, Vail Resorts, Xerox, Boost. Owner: Independent.

Cymfony: Enterprise-class monitoring platform
16. Cymfony provides market influence analytics by scanning and interpreting the millions of voices at the intersection of social and traditional media. It offers a listening and influence platform, Maestro, that integrates distinctive technology with input from expert analysts to identify the people, issues and trends impacting a business. All the standard metrics are included: posts/conversations, tonality, influencers, share of voice and so on. Cost: Pricey but competitive with other deep monitoring and analytics firms. Clients: Fortune 2000 clients. (A lack of transparency may be telling.) Owner: A unit of Kantar Media.

Buzzcapture: Insights into market buzz
17. Amsterdam-based Buzzcapture provides insight to organizations on the buzz in their market. Buzzcapture can track companies, products, product families, business lines, difficult or complex brands, topics, competitors, influencers, evangelists, critics and campaigns. All the information collected is analyzed and presented into understandable reports and entered into your dashboard. Cost: Typical price range is EU10,000 to EU70,000 ($13,000 to $91,000 US) for each research topic or group of products, with a standard license costing €30,000 ($39,000 US). Clients: TNT, Vodofone, ING, Nissan, BMW, Microsoft, AstraZeneca. Owner: Independent.

BuzzLogic: Tied to ad buy
18. BuzzLogic uses its technology platform to identify and organize the conversation universe, combining both conversation topic and audience to help brands reach audiences who are passionate on everything from the latest tech craze and cloud computing to parenthood and politics. However, the social media monitoring tool is no longer available as a standalone product. It now comes as part of BuzzLogic’s ad platform, requiring a media buy to connect to unique audiences through BuzzLogic. Cost: Unknown. Clients: Starbucks, American Express, HBO, HP, Microsoft. Focus on advertisers. Owner: Independent.

Meltwater Buzz: Overseas strength
19. Released in April 2009, Meltwater Buzz monitors, tracks and analyzes user-generated content on more than 200 million social media sites to help a brand understand its user sentiment and gauge competition. All data is stored in one intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard and a customer support representative is provided for the duration of the subscription. Meltwater, founded in Norway in 2001, now has 50 offices around the globe. It’s worth mentioning that they come from a traditional media tracking background, and with purchase of BuzzGain in February 2010, they added many more social media monitoring capabilities. BuzzGain is now baked into Meltwater Buzz. Cost: Standard subscription of one year for $13,000 gets you access for three to five users. Clients: Porsche Automotive North America, Vita-Mix, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Bausch & Lomb, Pabst Blue Ribbon and other corporations, nonprofits, government agencies. Owner: Meltwater Group.

Brandwatch: A focus on brand mentions
20. UK-based Brandwatch trawls the Internet looking at news, blogs, forums, wikis and social networking sites and finding mentions of brands, companies, products and people. Clients define keywords (brands, topics, people names, products) and receive reports and brand summaries that they can take action on. Cost: Pricing, based on a monthly subscription, starts at about $300/month. It operates on a per keyword pricing model. Clients: Aviva, Activision, CheapFlights, The Body Shop. Owner: Independent.
Note: BuzzGain, which was originally listed at No. 19, has been absorbed into Meltwater.


Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.

Other paid social media monitoring solutions

There are literally dozens of social media monitoring services in the marketplace, so this roundup is meant as a guide to the top-tier vendors rather than a comprehensive list.

• Amplified Analytics: This tool is geared chiefly toward product reviews and marketers interested in tracking reviews across multiple sites.
• Appinions: “Automatically filters and aggregates thoughts, feelings and statements from traditional and social media.”
• Atlassian: Australian-based software company with global reach, offers tools to track, test and collaborate on the social Web.
Bit.ly Pro: The Pro version offers custom short links like pep.si (for Pepsi) and 4sq.com (for Foursquare), a dashboard that lets you monitor the real-time aggregate traffic of your shared content across the bit.ly universe, and easy integration with tools like Tweetdeck and CoTweet.
Cision: Cision (formerly Bacon’s Information) monitors social, print, broadcast and online media outlets, then organizes the information, which a dedicated analyst delivers to a company’s in-box every day via an executive news briefing. Cision searches more than 100 million sources to assess conversations about a brand. Clients include UCLA, Gerber and R&R Partners.
CustomScoop: BuzzPerception: A veteran in the media monitoring space, CustomScoop monitors traditional and social media, calling themselves the “leading application for online news clipping.” BuzzPerception includes a phase of human filtering to generate the most relevant results for a brand. Pricing starts at $299/month. Jen Zingsheim, a representative, provides this update: “While we started out as a traditional media ‘clipping service,’ we’ve been including blog content for years and also monitor Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more. We can tailor reporting to fit client needs, and have a robust suite of analytical tools, too — along with a free, 2-week trial to see if we fit your needs.”
Digimind: Digimind designs and develops Digimind Evolution, a Competitive Intelligence Management software platform that enables companies to deploy and to manage competitive intelligence units and projects.
Dow Jones Insight, owned by News Corporation, touts a wide array of languages and geographies, a global footprint and a less-than-stellar dashboard. Its hefty $5,000/month pricetag is based on the fact that it’s heavily based on analysts’ involvement.
Evolve24 is a competitive listening platform that specializes in reputation management. Evolve24 is a smaller player in the market with only about 20 customers but its customer base consists of large enterprise-level installations.
FindAgent: Founded in 2002, UK-based FindAgent specializes in digital media monitoring and media analysis. Focusing purely on online content, the company, owned by OpenAmplify, has developed technologies to find, analyze and manage mentions in social media and traditional media. More than 500 companies use FindAgent’s semantic text analysis technology.
iCrossing is a global digital marketing agency that combines talent and technology to help world-class brands find and connect with their customers.
Jive: Jive Software, which acquired Filtrbox in 2010, offers a host of social media monitoring options.
• Moreover Technologies: Moreover and its Newsdesk 4 offer tools for media monitoring, reputation management, market and competitive intelligence and content sharing from 1.8 million sources.
• MotiveQuest: At the high end of monitoring services, MotiveQuest typically charges $70,000 per project, according to published reports. CEO David Rabjohns says MotiveQuest provides a full range of services. “You don’t have to use a dashboard. Just come to us with a business problem and we will help you find relevant insights. The core of our approach is digging beneath the buzz and the sentiment to identify primal human motivations. We have identified that these most strongly affect sales and share.” Clients include Microsoft, Nike, Citi, Audi and Kraft. MotiveQuest is positioned in the Strong Performer category in a 2006 Forrester report and it has a Slideshare presentation on leveraging motivations in social media.
• MutualMind: A relative newcomer, MutualMind helps marketers, agencies and PR firms track discussions, understand sentiment, identify influencers and use the resulting insights to improve positioning and marketing strategy. Pricing ranges from $500 to several thousand dollars per month.
NetBase offers social media analysis tools that help marketing and sales professionals to understand consumer opinion, emotion and behavior online.
Nimble is an LA-based start-up due to come out of private beta soon with a promising set of monitoring capabilities across multiple networks. Says Nimble’s Maria Ogneva: “We tie monitoring to the customer record. The real beauty is that you can monitor based on a keyword, respond as you need and even create a task right from the social media mention — whether it happens to be a tweet, FB message, LI message — which can be edited, calendared, delegated and commented on for team workflow that ties back to the record — the key ingredient here.”
Optify is a real time marketing applications suite that offers several features to help you track, monitor and measure the success of your social media activities.
• ReputationDefender: The company offers four suites of online reputation management and privacy controls.
• RepuMetrix specializes in tracking online mentions that are perceived to be harmful to a brand’s reputation. Pricing starts at $350/month for one user.
• RepuTrack: RepuTrack is a reputation monitoring service that tracks and analyzes the conversation around a brand and delivers it in an actionable way.
• SAS Sentiment Analysis Manager: Part of SAS Text Analytics program, the Sentiment Analysis Manager “crawls content sources, including mainstream Web sites and social media outlets, as well as internal organizational text sources [and] creates reports that describe the expressed feelings of consumers, customers and competitors in real time.”
• Sentiment Metrics: United Kingdom-based company provides tools to listen to consumer conversations across more than 20 million blogs, 5 million forum posts and 30,000 online news sources, social networks and microblogs, including Twitter. Clients include Sony, Subaru and HSBC.
• Trendrr: Mostly focused on the entertainment community, Trendrr lets you track the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of channels, ranging from social networks to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time. You can also have Trendrr do a Social Media Audit, providing an analysis of your social media presence, dissecting volume of mentions, sentiment, links, influencers, demographics and more. Pricing: $499 and $999/month, with enterprise package beginning at $2,499/month. NBC Universal’s Oxygen TV show “Bad Girls Club” is a client. Owner: Wiredset LLC.



360 degree marketing communication strategy

What is 360 degree marketing?

360 degree marketing is a type of online marketing. It includes the usage of KPO services, a form of online marketing. This is the combination of the best SEO practices and the best content for a successful marketing. KPO (Knowledge Process Outsourcing) basically includes processes that demand advanced information search, analytical, interpretation and technical skills as well as some judgment and decision-making. It is an effective tool for 360 degree marketing.

What is the main aim of 360 degree marketing?

The main aim of this form of marketing is utilizing the best marketing tools to attain the best result. In other words 360 degree marketing is not involving any new marketing, instead fuller utilization of the most effective ones for the best productivity. In the present time this marketing tool is very effective. There is a huge competition in the market. Only the companies providing fresh and most effective marketing applications can survive. This knowledge process outsourcing service is most effective. It helps in the outsourcing business over a larger expanse.



Few elements of 360 degree marketing:

This new phenomena in the business vocabulary mainly involves the following elements. They are:

o Online Communication:
There are several online communication strategies which enhances the popularity of your business. By using search engine optimization techniques you can reach the largest amount of viewers. This will in turn be profitable for your business.

o Quality Content:
Another important element to be highly effective in your marketing strategy is the publication of high quality content. A well organized content can do miracles for your online business.

o High visibility with the help of SEO and SEM:
By applying this strategy you can get the maximum access to your customers. Search engine optimization services give you the maximum access. These tools will also enhance your marketing.

o Social Networking
This is another element of 360 degree marketing. It helps you to reach several consumers from your contacts. The social media websites like Facebook, Twitter are effective in making friends and associates. These contacts are later used in professional purpose.

o PPC (pay per click)
This is another element for accessing the productivity or popularity of your business. There are some special ads on the website which will help you to know how many times your product has been viewed by counting the number of clicks made at it.
Therefore we can say that 360 degree marketing is the keyword for today's marketing. This is the most scientific strategy adapted by businessmen to expand their business. This form of marketing basically uses online marketing tools. KPO is an important form of online business used in 360 degree marketing. These knowledge process outsourcing services helps to attain valuable information. Later on this information gives a platform for future strategies and decision making.

In order to survive in the highly competitive world these KPO are very effective device for the businessmen of today. 360 degree approach in marketing is undoubtedly an important inclusion in the modern business scenario. Therefore winding up the article we can say that utilizing all online marketing tools, 360 degree approach is the new mantra for successful marketing.
 

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3299306

How to Generate Sales Leads

Generating sales leads is the process of making contact with and collecting information from prospective clients. In larger companies, generating sales leads falls to the marketing department, since they're responsible for creating all advertising and outreach materials. However, in smaller organizations, it's common for salesmen to have to do their own sales lead generation.

There are several proven techniques for generating sales leads:
  •     Networking
  •     Advertising (TV/print/Web)
  •     Telemarketing and teleprospecting
  •     Direct mail, fax or e-mail marketing campaigns
  •     Web sites and search engine optimization
  •     Buying a sales lead list
  •     other ways
Generating sales leads traditionally begins with networking. This is as simple as contacting your friends, family, former coworkers and existing clients and asking if they know anyone who may be interested in your product or service. These referrals are also called sales tips.

Besides networking, trade shows are excellent opportunities for business-to-business (B2B) networking. By setting up a table at a trade show, you can collect contact information from dozens of potential buyers and business partners.

Web advertising is fast becoming the most powerful way to generate sales leads. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, in the week of September 24-30, 2007, Web surfers clicked on over 53 billion online ads selling everything from financial services to cars to travel [source: Nielsen NetRatings]. These ads often lead to short surveys or contact forms that can be accessed in real-time by sales representatives. More on real-time and opt-in sales leads later.

The best sales leads you can have are word of mouth referrals from friends. Someone you know telling you about a product or service will have more impact than a celebrity commercial ever will. You need to consider how you can leverage your existing client base into new customers. You can arrange a referral system, rewarding current clients for new customers. Discounts, free goods and services are just some of the things you can offer.

If you own a store or restaurant, offer special rewards throughout the month. Seniors days, student days, and general customer appreciation days can bring in people off the street. As long as you provide them with good service and a great product, they will return. Point programs, coupons and other incentives like this are become the normal way to do business, and can help generate fresh leads.

Create an email newsletter, and have people sign up for it on your web site. This way you will have a list of people you know are interested in your product or service. Do not spam your list, as that will generate complaints and ill will. Send them interesting, usable information and include discounts to readers of the newsletter. This can generate a large number of sales, while providing your clients with value added service.

A mail campaign need not be a massive undertaking costing thousands of dollars. You can adopt a limited program in which you send out five or 10 pieces each week. The key in your program is to target your prospects and then follow up with a telephone call. By having a direct mail piece precede your call, you’ve warmed up a prospect – you can refer to the piece and ask the prospect if he or she’s had a chance to read it and has any questions.

Trade shows provide a venue for obtaining a large number of leads in a short amount of time. Whether you have a booth or table at the show or ware a visitor, you can exchange business cards with others at the show. Write key information on the back of each business card to help you remember something about each person.

The quickest way to assemble hundreds or thousands of sales leads is to buy a sales lead list. There are dozens of direct marketing companies who collect and sell specialty lists for certain business and consumer sectors. The advantage of these lists is that a salesman can get instant access to thousands of names and numbers for a few hundred dollars. The disadvantage is that all these names are unqualified leads, meaning they haven't been analyzed individually to see whether or not they're a good match for the salesman's specific product or service.

There are many ways to generate sales leads, but the most important thing to remember is that it all starts with excellent service. Your best clients tomorrow are ones that are happy with you today.

What's the Difference between Marketing and Advertising

You will often find that many people confuse marketing with advertising or vice versa. While both components are important they are very different. Knowing the difference and doing your market research can put your company on the path to substantial growth.

Let's start off by reviewing the formal definitions of each and then I'll go into the explanation of how marketing and advertising differ from one another:

Advertising: The paid, public, non-personal announcement of a persuasive message by an identified sponsor; the non-personal presentation or promotion by a firm of its products to its existing and potential customers.

Marketing: The systematic planning, implementation and control of a mix of business activities intended to bring together buyers and sellers for the mutually advantageous exchange or transfer of products.

There are many technical and complicated definitions of both advertising and marketing and the differences between them. But it can be stated rather simply:
  • Advertising tells a story about something to attract attention. Advertising is a step in the marketing process.
  • In business, “marketing” is the planning of, and steps taken, to bring merchants and consumers together.
After reading both of the definitions it is easy to understand how the difference can be confusing to the point that people think of them as one-in-the same, so lets break it down a bit.

Advertising is a single component of the marketing process. It's the part that involves getting the word out concerning your business, product, or the services you are offering. It involves the process of developing strategies such as ad placement, frequency, etc. Advertising includes the placement of an ad in such mediums as newspapers, direct mail, billboards, television, radio, and of course the Internet. Advertising is the largest expense of most marketing plans, with public relations following in a close second and market research not falling far behind.

The best way to distinguish between advertising and marketing is to think of marketing as a pie, inside that pie you have slices of advertising, market research, media planning, public relations, product pricing, distribution, customer support, sales strategy, and community involvement. Advertising only equals one piece of the pie in the strategy. All of these elements must not only work independently but they also must work together towards the bigger goal. Marketing is a process that takes time and can involve hours of research for a marketing plan to be effective. Think of marketing as everything that an organization does to facilitate an exchange between company and consumer. 

The Types of advertising :
Commercial advertising media can include wall paintings, billboards, street furniture components, printed flyers and rack cards, radio, cinema and television adverts, web banners, mobile telephone screens, shopping carts, web popups, skywriting, bus stop benches, human billboards, magazines, newspapers, town criers, sides of buses, banners attached to or sides of airplanes ("logojets"), in-flight advertisements on seatback tray tables or overhead storage bins, taxicab doors, roof mounts and passenger screens, musical stage shows, subway platforms and trains, elastic bands on disposable diapers,doors of bathroom stalls,stickers on apples in supermarkets, shopping cart handles (grabertising), the opening section of streaming audio and video, posters, and the backs of event tickets and supermarket receipts.

Television advertising / Music in advertising
    The TV commercial is generally considered the most effective mass-market advertising format, as is reflected by the high prices TV networks charge for commercial airtime during popular TV events.The majority of television commercials feature a song or jingle that listeners soon relate to the product. Virtual advertisements may be inserted into regular television programming through computer graphics.More controversially, virtual billboards may be inserted into the background where none exist in real-life.

Infomercials
    An infomercial is a long-format television commercial, typically five minutes or longer. The word "infomercial" combining the words "information" & "commercial". The main objective in an infomercial is to create an impulse purchase, so that the consumer sees the presentation and then immediately buys the product through the advertised toll-free telephone number or website. Infomercials describe, display, and often demonstrate products and their features, and commonly have testimonials from consumers and industry professionals.

Radio advertising
    Radio advertising is a form of advertising via the medium of radio. Radio advertisements are broadcast as radio waves to the air from a transmitter to an antenna and a thus to a receiving device. Airtime is purchased from a station or network in exchange for airing the commercials. While radio has the limitation of being restricted to sound, proponents of radio advertising often cite this as an advantage. Radio is an expanding medium that can be found not only on air, but also online.

Online advertising
    Online advertising is a form of promotion that uses the Internet and World Wide Web for the expressed purpose of delivering marketing messages to attract customers. Online ads are delivered by an ad server. Examples of online advertising include contextual ads that appear on search engine results pages, banner ads, in text ads, Rich Media Ads, Social network advertising, online classified advertising, advertising networks and e-mail marketing, including e-mail spam.

Product placements
    Covert advertising, also known as guerrilla advertising, is when a product or brand is embedded in entertainment and media. For example, in a film, the main character can use an item or other of a definite brand, as in the movie Minority Report, where Tom Cruise's character John Anderton owns a phone with the Nokia logo clearly written in the top corner, or his watch engraved with the Bulgari logo.

Press advertising
    Press advertising describes advertising in a printed medium such as a newspaper, magazine, or trade journal. This encompasses everything from media with a very broad readership base, such as a major national newspaper or magazine, to more narrowly targeted media such as local newspapers and trade journals on very specialized topics. A form of press advertising is classified advertising, which allows private individuals or companies to purchase a small, narrowly targeted ad for a low fee advertising a product or service. Another form of press advertising is the Display Ad, which is a larger ad (can include art) that typically run in an article section of a newspaper.

Billboard advertising
    Billboards are large structures located in public places which display advertisements to passing pedestrians and motorists. Most often, they are located on main roads with a large amount of passing motor and pedestrian traffic; however, they can be placed in any location with large amounts of viewers, such as on mass transit vehicles and in stations, in shopping malls or office buildings, and in stadiums.

Mobile billboard advertising
    Mobile billboards are generally vehicle mounted billboards or digital screens. These can be on dedicated vehicles built solely for carrying advertisements along routes preselected by clients, they can also be specially equipped cargo trucks or, in some cases, large banners strewn from planes. Mobile displays are used for various situations in metropolitan areas throughout the world, including: Target advertising, One-day, and long-term campaigns, Conventions, Sporting events, Store openings and similar promotional events, and Big advertisements from smaller companies.

In-store advertising
    In-store advertising is any advertisement placed in a retail store. It includes placement of a product in visible locations in a store, such as at eye level, at the ends of aisles and near checkout counters (aka POP—Point Of Purchase display), eye-catching displays promoting a specific product, and advertisements in such places as shopping carts and in-store video displays.

Coffee cup advertising
    Coffee cup advertising is any advertisement placed upon a coffee cup that is distributed out of an office, cafĂ©, or drive-through coffee shop.

Celebrity branding
    This type of advertising focuses upon using celebrity power, fame, money, popularity to gain recognition for their products and promote specific stores or products. Advertisers often advertise their products, for example, when celebrities share their favorite products or wear clothes by specific brands or designers. Celebrities are often involved in advertising campaigns such as television or print adverts to advertise specific or general products.

The benefits of advertising which include:

1.Information to the customer.
Advertisement about new products keeps the customer informed about the new developments in the industry. They help to provide them information regarding the newly launched products.

2.Takes care of customers.
Advertising takes care of customers. It helps in holding on to the loyal customer, decreasing the number of lost customers and enlisting new customers. Thus the overall effect of advertising is increase in the number of customers that will gradually become loyal to the product.

3.Improves the sale of product.
Advertising facilitates a noticeable increase in the sale of the product. It thus helps reduces per unit cost of the product and help the businesses to earn profits.

4.Alters the attitudes of people.
An effectual advertisement results in a swift change in the attitudes and habits of the people.

5.Direct communication.
In earlier days customers believed on the opinions of retailers, when making the purchases of products. With the rapid spread of media and advertising to every nook and corner of the world, people have become aware of the various products that are available in the same category and the freebees and benefits of purchasing them. So the companies or manufacturers are able to communicate their message directly to the customers.

6.Increase employment.
Advertising is a complicated task and a lot of people are involved in the making of an advertisement. Research team, design team and many other people are required to make and deliver it. So, advertisements generate employment for a lot of people.

7.Economic progress.
Advertising increases sales, employment and profits. The overall effect of all this is economic progress for the nation, or more broadly for the world as a whole.

8.Religious and moral benefits.
Social and religious institutions use advertising for communicating their messages like messages of patriotism, faith, compassion tolerance, and charity toward needy, messages related to health and education. These educate people and guide better behavior.

Advertising through every medium offers some or the other benefits. But nowadays the most popular medium of advertisement is through television. Although the cost of advertising is quite high but the benefits in the long run balance the high cost associate to it.
 
source: marketing sites

What is the difference between marketing and sales?

Let's think about this question for a moment. Without marketing you would not have prospects or leads to follow up with, but yet without a good sales technique and strategy your closing rate may depress you.

Marketing is the process of teaching consumers why they should choose your product or service over your competitors; if you are not doing that you are not marketing. It’s really that simple! The key is finding the right method and defining the right message to use to educate and influence your consumers. Marketing is everything that you do to reach and persuade prospects. The sales process is everything that you do to close the sale and get a signed agreement or contract. Both are necessities to the success of a business. You cannot do without either process. By strategically combining both efforts you will experience a successful amount of business growth. However, by the same token if the efforts are unbalanced it candetour your growth.

Your marketing will consists of the measures you use to reach and persuade your prospects that you are the company for them. It's the message that prepares the prospect for the sales. It consists of advertising, public relations, brand marketing, viral marketing, and direct mail. 

The sales process consists of interpersonal interaction. It is often done by a one-on-one meeting, cold calls, and networking. It's anything that engages you with the prospect or customer on a personal level rather than at a distance.

Your marketing efforts begin the process of the eight contacts that studies show it takes to move a prospect or potential client to the close of the sale. If marketing is done effectively you can begin to move that prospect from a cold to a warm lead. When the prospect hitsthe"warm" level it's much easier for the sales professional to close the sale.

As you see in the explanation above it takes multiple contacts using both sales and marketing to move the prospect from one level to the next. That is why it is import that you develop a process that combines both sales and marketing. This will enable you to reach prospects at all three levels; cold, warm, and hot. It's all about balance.  

The following methods of contact:
  • Cold Lead Strategy - Send out a direct mailing or offer them a special promotion
  • Warm Lead Strategy - Try a follow-up call, send out a sales letter, or schedule a special seminar or training session to get all of your warm leads together.
As marketers we can help the sales department when we understand what it is they need to be successful. A sales person goes through several phases in order to court a prospect into a client or customer. When we understand those phases we are better at creating marketing materials that will work for them, both in efficiency and effectiveness. 

Prospects don't care how long you've been in business, unless you are in the final phases and they are comparing you with a competitor and everything else measures up equally. That may be one straw that helps make that decision, but if the sales person has created the relationship with the prospect this factor is almost null, so don't build your entire marketing kit around how long you've been in business - a one liner will do just fine. 

A prospective customer needs to know why you are different and why they should choose your company or your product, if you can't explain this in your marketing materials, how can you expect sales to use that information to sell? Create a tool that helps them in differentiating you.
A sales person needs to be equipped with the tools that help them create the relationship with the prospect and assist them in finding common ground or mutual attraction with the prospect.

Marketing collateral is anything that supports or serves the selling of products or services. Most things sold today have some type of collateral, ranging from packaging to brochures and videos. Following is a partial list of printed collateral available for many things sold:
  • Sales brochures
  • Signs
  • Posters
  • White papers (research reports)
  • Pamphlets
  • Product data sheets
  • Sales scripts
  • Business cards

In the past two decades, more emphasis has been put on developing audio and video collateral for salespeople. A/V collateral is everything from PowerPoint presentations to video guides that customers can use to install or maintain purchased products. Audio/video collateral includes:
  • Presentation slides and programs
  • Audio sales tapes
  • Videotape and DVD presentations
  • Web content

Image Collateral

Another component in your sales tool kit should be image collateral — things that help you establish your company's image. These tools include anything with your brand name on it: coffee mugs, T-shirts, hats, emblem jackets, key chain fobs, and football stadiums.

These following tips are basic guidelines that most any sales person can benefit from :
  • Listen to the emotional side of your prospect or client: Emotions are tied into almost everything we do even if we don't realize it. Your client may mention off-hand that they are really stressed-out about a particular project they are working on (even if it doesn't relate to what you're selling them). Make a note of this and see if there is anything you can do to assist them. You may have another client who had a similar dilemma and found a good solution. Make those connections and help where ever you can. You'll be rewarded with loyalty from all of your clients.
  • Focus on your prospect or client's needs: We've talked about it before, but it's worth mentioning again. You may be tempted to sell your client your top-of-the-line model gadget when they really only need the mid-line model. By selling them more than they need, you may be cutting off future relations with them. Once they realize (and they will eventually) that they don't need most of what you sold them, they'll feel bitter and resentful toward you for wasting their money and not looking out for their best interest. They'll see you as a "salesperson" and not as a resource.
  • Use language that focuses on your prospect or client: Simply changing the way you speak may also make a difference in how you are received by your prospect. Using "you" and "yours," or "you'll find..." rather than "I think" or "Let me tell you about," brings your message a little closer to home and may grab their attention more quickly.
  • Help your prospect see the bottom line: If you know your product can help clients save money, or increase profitability, then make sure they understand that. Your product may have an edge in that it includes features that save time. Time is money as the saying goes, and if you can save time your can often sell your product.
  • Find out your prospect's priorities: You can save yourself a lot of wasted time and effort by simply knowing how important your product and its benefits are to your prospect. If you've listened to them and determined the need, but still aren't getting anywhere, find out if there are other elements of their business that are taking priority and pushing your sale aside. If you know they have to implement a program before they can spend time considering (or funds purchasing) your product then you can schedule a call back at a later date that may stand a better chance of getting some attention. To do this you have to ask the questions because the information is not always volunteered. (Again, the key is focusing on the needs of your prospect, and having an open relationship already in place.)
  • Know your prospect: Find out as much as you possibly can about your prospect before your appointment. This will not only help you anticipate their needs ahead of time, but will also show them you've done your homework and have an interest in their business other than just selling your product. When talking with them, let them do most of the talking. People usually love talking about their businesses and its successes. For example, you might bring up the fact that you saw they won an award at a regional meeting then let them proceed to fill you in on the details. You might also compliment them on the efficiency of their production system or the quality of their products. This will also open the door to more conversation and the opportunity to learn more about their needs and how your product will fit those needs.
  • Focus on why they should buy - not their objections: The idea here is that while you are building up the benefits associated with using your product, they will be minimizing their resistance to it. By focusing on what you know the prospect likes, you are building up the importance of the positive and reducing the importance of the negatives.
  • Sell the benefits - not the product: You've heard this one before, but it is worth repeating. In most cases, you're not selling your product, you're selling the benefits the product will produce. In other words, you're not selling digital phones, you're selling the ability to communicate from anywhere. You are selling freedom to leave the confines of the office and still be accessible. You're selling the ability to have a more flexible work schedule. You're selling peace of mind for long trips. You're selling security. Get to the emotional or financial benefits and you're on to something!
  • Never rush the sale or the customer: Remember the section about building a relationship with your customers? This is a very important step. It can help give the prospect the right perception of you and your company. Rushing them instead of letting them come to their own decision to buy can create hostilities that can't be overturned. It can make the difference between getting the sale and creating a loyal customer, and having to start over with another prospect. In the competitive climate of many markets, you definitely don't want to risk losing a qualified prospect who you know needs your product.
  • Know your products, as well as the market - be a RESOURCE: In order to be seen as a valuable resource for your clients, you have to demonstrate that you not only know and understand your products and the market, but can assist them in making good decisions and provide them with tools to improve their business. If you don't have these skills and knowledge, get them. You'll be rewarded over and over by loyal clients who trust your opinions and advice, and buy from you frequently.
  • Follow through with promises: If you do nothing else, do this. Always follow through with what you say you are going to do. If you say you'll send a quote by Friday - DO IT! If you say you'll check with someone else in your company about an issue that's come up - DO IT! Don't forget. Use the technology available to you (even if it's a sticky note on your dash board!) and make sure you follow through with your promises. There is no surer way to lose the faith of a prospect (or existing client) than to forget to do something you tell them you will do. If something comes up that forces you to have to delay, call them and give them a heads up. They may have a meeting arranged to present the information you're supplying them with, and if they don't have it you'll both look bad.
  • Focus on your client's success: Not to beat a dead horse, but there is tremendous value in being a resource for your client. If you can help them to succeed then they are more likely to help you succeed. Be a coach for your clients (at least in your areas of expertise). You have the unique perspective of seeing how many different businesses operate. Gather this knowledge and share it with your clients or prospects. Make sure they understand that you want to see them succeed, not just sell your products.
  • Use explanations rather than excuses: If you do have to explain to a customer why there is a problem with their order, their repair, their service, etc. Explain why the problem is there in the first place, rather than using an excuse. For example, if you provide health care services and you're having difficulty meeting the scheduling needs of the customer, you might it explain it like this, "With this being a particularly bad allergy season we have had more emergency calls due to asthma (or whatever the case may be) and these patients can't wait for a scheduled appointment. Our staff is behind schedule, but we are addressing the problem now by bringing in temporary help for these critical need times. So we should be able to schedule your service on 'x' date." Understanding the problem may help alleviate some of their frustration. Verbalizing the cause may also keep you more aware of the potential problems so you can be more prepared the next time around.
source: marketing sites

Learning Google AdWords

Google Adwords is the system Google has developed to assist you in marketing your products or services in the Google Search Engine, and its affiliate sites, via the use of a placed text ad that appears when people search for phrases related to your offering, this appears as a “sponsored link”. The system is a “pay per click” system, this means you can dictate where your ad appears through bidding for a series of phrases, but you only pay the amount you have bid for if someone clicks on your ad as a result of a web search, i.e. pay per click! AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, cost-per-thousand (CPM) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for text, banner, and rich-media ads.

Google AdWords is one of the leading pay per click advertising programs on the web. Google AdWords' main competitors are Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. In 2010, Yahoo formed a partnership with Microsoft, giving Microsoft the control over powering the Yahoo search marketing ads. Both accounts are now run through Microsoft AdCenter. When ads are displayed on Yahoo now, it is powered by Microsoft AdCenter and is run through the Microsoft software interface.
 Correct choice of keywords is very important because the targeting of ads by Google is totally dependent upon the keyword selection. Keyword choice is also a very large factor in determining the level of exposure the Google ad receives, and to a large extent, who sees the ad.The Google Adwords Keyword Tool provides a list of related keywords for a specific website or keyword.

The AdWords system was initially implemented on top of the MySQL database engine. After the system had been launched, management decided to use Oracle instead. The system became much slower, so eventually it was returned to MySQL. The interface has also been revamped to offer better work flow with additional new features, such as Spreadsheet Editing, Search Query Reports, and better conversion metrics.


The ad will appear on the page of results you decide you want to appear in. For instance page 1 of Google for a search result. The ads appear at the top and to the right of the organic search engine results.You can also pitch at what position on the page your ad will appear, through the amount you bid. Crudely this may mean the more you bid for a phrase, the higher your ad appears on page 1 of the Google Result.

There isn’t a minimum spending commitment with Google AdWords, there is a one time activation fee of €5 for opening your account and the minimum cost per click is €0.01 or €0.20 for every 1000 internet users that sees your ad. AdWords accepts major international credit cards, debit cards, direct debit, and bank transfer payments.You choose the currency you want to use before setting up your account (and are unable to change this option later).

You have two payment options – either postpay or prepay. As a note of caution, you choose either postpay or prepay at the very beginning of setting up your AdWords account and are unable to change this setting later. However, you can change the credit card or account etc. at a later date if you wish.
  1.     Postpay – You only pay after building up advertising costs and are billed every 30 days.
  2.     Prepay – You add funds to your account, and your advertising costs are deducted from that balance. When you run out of funds, your ads stop until you make another payment.
You have the liberty to adjust your advertising budget to what you feel comfortable spending. Adwords allows you to set a daily budget for each of your advertising campaigns, so you have total control on your spend.

Before setting up your AdWords account it’s best to figure out what goals you have for this advertising campaign. Ask yourself the following questions to help determine your advertising goals:
  1. What does your company (or division) do? Do you have different product lines? What are they?
  2. Who’s your primary audience (target market) for your products and services? Do you need to reach different audiences with separate ads?
  3. What are you trying to sell or promote? What do you want people to do (buy, visit, download, subscribe)?
  4. What results would you like to see? What would you consider a good return on your investment?
Once you have established your goals you will find it much easier to set up your first ad campaign and later on you will be able to use AdWords reporting to determine if you’ve reached those goals.
Of note: Before setting up your account make sure that the product you wish to advertise complies with Google’s advertising policies.

Benefits of Google AdWords

1. Easy implementation

You can set up a Google AdWords account within 30 minutes or less. After creating an account at adwords.google.com, you simply create a short ad, select your keyword phrases using the Google Keyword Tool then tell Google how much you want to spend each day and how much you want to spend per click for each keyword.

After activating the campaign your ad will be displayed on the right side of the search engine results pages. There’s a lot more to learn about how to tweak your campaigns to profitability however I’ll cover that in later articles.

2. No web site needed

You can become an affiliate marketer by signing up for an affiliate program then promote it with Google AdWords. You receive an affiliate link from the product web site which you include in your ad. When someone clicks on this URL and orders the product you receive an affiliate commission.
If you find several profitable products to promote you can make money very quickly.

3. Make money fast

The key to creating profitable Google AdWords campaigns is your return on investment (ROI). For example if your affiliate commission is $100.00 you need to make 1 sale before spending over $100 on clicks. If your cost per click (CPC) is $1.00 then 100 clicks will cost you $100.00.

After creating one profitable campaign, create several others so you will multiply your profits. One word of caution..not every campaign you set up will be profitable so use the profits generated from your successful ones to set up others.

4. Market any type of product

Marketing affiliate products enables you to select from 10s of 1000s of products. You’re only limited by your imagination. Clickbank and Commission Junction are two of the most popular networks to find affiliate products to promote.

If marketing affiliate products, you don’t have to worry about offering customer service, you don’t need a web site and you get paid for promoting the affiliate product. If the product doesn’t sell well, you just move on to another product.

5. Sell your own products

The beauty of selling you own products ie ebooks, reports, goods is that you receive the full price instead of just getting a commission. You can also set up an affiliate program and get others to promote your product. Super affiliates can bring you a lot of sales.

6. Test market products

How do you know if your idea of a new product will sell?
Google AdWords enables you to quickly test the profitability of your product by creating a couple of ads. After letting your ads run for a while you’ll quickly see which keywords convert ads into sales. If you only get a few or no clicks you’ll know the product won’t sell. This will save you a lot of time and money building and marketing a web site that may not be profitable.

7. Get your ads displayed immediately on the first page of Google

If you tried to get on the first page of Google for organic listings (web sites listed on the left side) it may take months, years because of the fierce competition. You’d first have to build a web site then optimize it for the search engines and create a link building campaign. Often sites listed near the top of the search engines have 1000s of incoming links pointing to them from other sites. A new web site will take a long time to compete with these well established ones.

8. Set your own budget

You can specify the amount you wish to spend per day and the amount to spend on each click. For example you can set your daily amount to $5.00. After the number and cost of clicks reaches that figure your ads won’t be shown again until the next day.

9. Generate lots of immediate traffic to your web site

Instead of waiting for your web site to get indexed by the search engines you can drive traffic to it instantly with Google AdWords. For example if your main keyword gets 30,000 searches per month and you bid on it you’ll start receiving some of those 30,000 visitors.

10. Split test your ads

Google allows you to split test 2 ads against each other using the same keywords for both. If one ad is not performing you simply create another and run it against the best one. You can keep doing this to create the perfect ad..one that receives the highest conversion rate.

11. Enable precise targeting

Your ads allow geographic targeting. For example you can target a specific country, blocks of countries, a state, or city.

Your ads allow time targeting. For example, you can specify your ads to only appear from 10am until 2pm on Thursdays or weekends. You have enormous control over the timing of your campaigns.

12. Manage and monitor your campaigns

Google utilizes several tools to manage and track your campaigns. Some of these include:
  • Keyword Tool
Build a master list of new keywords for your ad groups and review detailed keyword performance statistics like advertiser competition and search volume.
  • Traffic Estimator
Estimates how much traffic you get for your keywords.
  • Conversion Tracking
Learn which ads are the best at helping you reach your goals.
  • Website Optimizer
Experiment with different versions of a page on your website to discover the best content for boosting your business.
  • AdWords Editor
This campaign management application enables you to make changes offline, then upload your revised campaigns.
  • Google Analytics
Helps you find out what keywords attract your most desirable prospects, what advertising copy pulled the most responses, and what landing pages and content make the most money for you.

Google AdWords is very flexible and can be highly adapted to your needs. However, preparation is the key to a successful first advertising campaign.

Once you have your advertising goals worked out you will be able to follow the steps to setting up your first campaign. This is important because when you first sign up to AdWords you will be brought through the entire process of setting up a campaign. This will not be an overwhelming experience if you are highly prepared and already know what product you would like to start advertising and who you want to advertise to.

The basic steps to setting up AdWords and your first ad campaign:
  1.     Choose which languages and locations you want to target.
  2.     Build a small list of keywords and create your first ads (together known as an ad group).
  3.     Set your pricing. Specify your currency and daily budget.
  4.     Activate your AdWords account by entering your billing information.
  5.     Your ad campaign will start running.

Targeting Languages and Locations


AdWords allows you to target people who speak 38 different languages and live in 250 countries all over the world. However, you probably don’t need all of them to see your ad.

Choose the language both you and your customers speak. For instance if your website is only available in English you should only target English speakers. You must also select the language in which you want your ads to display. Google will not translate your ads for you, but will show your ads to users whose Google interface language matches the language that your campaign targets.

If you are selling your product worldwide you’ll likely want to target your ads to all countries and territories. In this case if you have chosen English as the language preference than any person using Google in English all over the world will be targeted by your ads. However, if you only ship to certain countries you should only target these specific areas.

Remember, every click to your ad will cost you money, so when you direct a user to your website that is unable to follow through with a purchase then you are wasting part of your advertising budget. By taking advantage of language preferences and location settings you can increase the power of your ads to convert visitors into customers, and you will also be improving the relevance of your ads.

The language and geographical target options can be changed at any time, and you can also run different campaigns into different countries or for different language settings.

Create Your First Ad Group – Keywords and Ads

Although AdWords allows you to setup many different ad groups (a list of keywords and corresponding ads) that all fall under the same campaign settings (such as language and location targeting), since this is your very first AdWords campaign you will start with just one ad group and one text ad.

Create an ad

The most important thing to remember when creating your ad is that there is a limit for the amount of text you can write, so you have to make sure make every word counts.

Text ads can contain, including spaces, 25 characters for the title, 70 characters for the ad text, and 35 characters for a display URL. This is displayed on four lines: a headline, two lines of descriptive ad text, and a URL line.
  • Headline – Try to make this something catchy.
  • Description – Give a brief description of your product, and try to include any special offers.
  • URL – You can display a shortened version of the actual URL you’re sending prospective customers to.
Don’t forget that the text in your ad is the first trigger for potential customers.
You can change all the fields in your ad at a later date, or create new ads until you find the perfect one.

Select your keywords

We suggest starting out with a small well thought out list of keywords that you want to trigger your ad. These keywords must relate to your ad and the product you are selling.

At this point the AdWords Keyword Tool should be able to help you find any additional keywords which you may have not have considered. However, it is best to start with just a few keywords to test what works and what doesn’t.

You can create additional keyword lists or edit this one later.

Set Your Pricing
Choose your currency


As a note of caution, you can not change your currency settings at a later date. These settings will apply to your entire AdWords account. Make sure the currency you choose favors you the most. The currency applies to both billing and payments.

Choose maximum cost per click (CPC)

The maximum cost per click is the sum you can afford to pay for a click. However, that doesn’t mean you’ll actually pay it as Google AdWords automatically optimizes your costs for you, so you may end up paying slightly less for every click to your ad.

Based on the keywords you entered, the AdWords system will calculate a suggested maximum CPC and show you the clicks and costs per day that would result. You can accept that CPC or enter one of your own.

You should enter a low number to begin with and click the “Get Estimate” button to find out if your ads will display at that price and where your ad will show in comparison to similar ads. You may have to raise your price for better positioning.

You can try more CPCs for each keyword in the ad group and calculate estimates to see which CPC suits your budget.

Set Your Daily Budget

Using the estimates you can figure out how much you can afford to spend each month. It is best to set a maximum daily budget in order to have a balanced campaign.
Activate your Account

The last step in the Adwords account setup process is entering your personal details. If you already have a Google account your details will be already in the system. Once you have received your activation email from AdWords you must login to your account and input your billing information.

Your ads will not run until you have entered your billing details.

The cost of AdWords

AdWords gives you control over your advertising costs. There's no minimum spending requirement. You get to set the maximum amount you're willing to spend each day and choose how you'll spend your money.

How costs are calculated

Every time someone searches on Google, AdWords runs an auction to determine the ads that show on the search results, and their rank on the page. To place your ads in this auction, you set a bidding option in your account.
Most people starting out in AdWords use the basic cost-per-click bidding (CPC) option, which means they accrue costs based on the number of clicks they get on their ads. If you use this option, the amount you're charged per click depends in part on the maximum cost-per-click bid you set in your account, also called maximum CPC bid. This represents the highest amount that you'll ever pay for an ad click. In fact, you'll be charged only the amount necessary to keep your ad at its position on the page.

Example:

A few other factors, such as ad quality, determine the exact cost of a click on your ad. But if you've set a maximum CPC bid of $1 for your ads, then the most you'll pay when a customer clicks your ad is $1. And if your competition bids only $0.50 for the same ad position, you'll only need to pay $0.51 to show your ad, assuming your ads are similar in all other aspects.

The components of a text ad

All online ads are essentially clickable messages that connect customers with a website.
Text ads, the simplest version of a clickable message, contain three components: a headline, display URL, and a description. Let's look at the components of the sample ad below:
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Headline
Display URL
Description

Headline

The first line of your ad is the one that customers are most likely to notice. If you really want your headline to stand out, consider including keywords. People are more likely to notice headlines that match what they're searching for. In our sample ad, the keyword "advertise" should get the attention of people who are searching for ways to advertise online.

Display URL

Appearing in green, this line of your ad shows the address of the website that you're promoting. AdWords lets you choose a brief but meaningful display URL to give people who see your ad a clear idea of where it'll take them when they click on the link. Behind the scenes, you can also assign your text ads a different destination URL, which takes the person who clicks your ad to a precise location on the same website that's relevant to the ad itself. People can only see the display URL in your ad and not the destination URL.

Description

The final lines of your text ad are where you describe the product or service you're advertising. Space is limited, so choose your words carefully to highlight the most important details and benefits.

source: google