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Around 2009, small business followed the lead of big businesses and created pages on social network sites right and left. They might have heard somewhere on the Internet that social network is a great way to reach customers and profiles are free to set up, so why not?

A lot of those pages are graveyards now. They haven’t been updated in months and almost nobody Likes them. They didn’t even get a very good response when they were active.

A lot of businesses gave up once they didn’t see a surge in new customers, but no form of advertising can do that for very little work. Everything worth anything takes time and effort, and companies forgot that because they expected social network profiles to provide instant rewards with little effort. Social network requires effort just like any other form of marketing outreach, so how can you improve your social network marketing campaign?

Put some time into it

Casually telling your friends to Like your company page on Facebook won’t cut it. A few of their friends might see posts about your company, but social networks is all about contacting highly targetable customers.

Run an advertising campaign

Let’s say you run an insurance brokerage that sells medical insurance locally. Social networks like Facebook allow you to run targeted ads based on demographics, people’s interests, and even pages that people Like. You can make an ad that is directed toward people who Like, say, pages relating to medical insurance, or healthcare reform. Or, you can go even narrower and make an ad for health insurance with an orthopodic addendum that’s aimed at people who are in Facebook groups about foot health problems.

Social media monitoring

Most social networks have analytics tools that let you see the effectiveness of your advertising in terms of how many people click on your ads, but that’s where they stop. You aren’t able to find out whether or not people are talking about your company or your products. That’s why companies like Alerti offer social media monitoring services to let your company know what people are saying about you online, both on social networks and other forms of social media, like blogs.

Measure your success early

When you run a traditional advertising campaign, you have to wait weeks or more to see if you’re getting good results. Even AdSense campaigns take a while to get accurate results since the variance is so high and Google likes to show campaigns quick results so that they keep buying AdSense ads. However, social media monitoring tools let you get results instantly. When you sign up for a service like Alerti, you can see any social media post relating to certain keywords or linking back to certain URL’s. So, if you make a blog post about your company and promote it on social media, you can easily see if people are reposting your post and talking about it online. Furthermore, most social media monitoring tools have analytics that let you see where people are talking about you the most so that you can focus your marketing efforts on the appropriate social networks.

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray and his company Influence People do blogger outreach work for a variety of clients, such as Alerti.

Show notes. Here are the links we discussed in the podcast:

• HootSuite
• Bit.ly
• Twitalyzer
• SproutSocial
• PeerIndex
• CoTweet
• Twitter Grader
• Wildfire Analytics
• Klout
• 10 Twitter tools for better social networking (Webdesigner depot)

Subscribe to the Sazcast podcast:

• Subscribe in iTunes
• Subscribe to the feed

To see all the Sazcast episodes, click here.

If you have a topic idea you’d like us to discuss, please email us at sazcast [at] sazbean [dot] com or send us a message on Twitter @sazbean. Please consider reviewing us on the iTunes site or emailing us your comments and ideas at sazcast@sazbean.com. Intro Music by: Band: Tripudio, Song: Blue monday

Show notes. Here are the links we discussed in the podcast:

• ComScore: Mobile Social Networking App Audience Grows 126% In Past Year (ReadWriteWeb)
• Half of adult cell phone owners have apps on their phones (Pew Internet)
• Internet Trends via Mary Meeker — October 2011
• Why Mobile Social Media Matters – Statistics, Trends, Technologies
• Google GoMo Helps Businesses Go Mobile (Mashable)
• List of countries by number of mobile phones in use (wikipedia)
• WPtouch Pro (mobile plugin for WordPress)
• 11 Ways to Create a Mobile Friendly WordPress Site (wpbeginner)
• 10 Mobile Plugins for WordPress (DailyBlogTips)
• Lifehacker.com (good mobile site)
• Wunderground (good mobile site)

Subscribe to the Sazcast podcast:

• Subscribe in iTunes
• Subscribe to the feed

To see all the Sazcast episodes, click here.

If you have a topic idea you’d like us to discuss, please email us at sazcast [at] sazbean [dot] com or send us a message on Twitter @sazbean. Please consider reviewing us on the iTunes site or emailing us your comments and ideas at sazcast@sazbean.com. Intro Music by: Band: Tripudio, Song: Blue monday

This is a guest post by Andy Havard, who is a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company.

Video blogs are rapidly taking over the blogging world, but many Internet users are still apprehensive about making the transition from text blogging to video blogging. A lot of text bloggers struggle with the idea of getting confident on camera, especially when it’s outside of their traditional blogging comfort zone. The following article explores how you can create confident video blogs on the Internet and enjoy the popularity that ‘vlogging’ is receiving across the web.

1. Always Know What You Are Talking About

The simplest way to appear confident on camera is to know your topic. Make sure you’ve researched your subject area well and even take time to script what you want to say in your video. If you naturally get nervous speaking publicly, then having a solid subject knowledge on the tip of your tongue will minimise the chances of you stumbling on your words. When you know what you’re talking about, you’ll look like you know what you’re talking about too. This will make your video blogs appear very confident and extremely knowledgeable.

2.  Make Sure You Know Your Target Audience

The chances of your vlog getting seen by every Internet user in the world is pretty slim. A lot of on-screen nerves actually comes from vloggers thinking there’s millions of people watching their video. Your real audience will be those interested in the topics and subjects you’re discussing on your video blog, or users familiar with your written blog. This means that you’ll easily be able to find out who the audiences in your niche are and the content they enjoy, which theoretically means you should be of the same disposition. Once you’ve understood the content your audience likes and what they engage with well, you can create your video blogs in the same vain. If you can engage with your audience you’ll make a stronger connection with them and that should in turn help you to get more and more confident on camera.

3. Get Comfortable With The ‘On-Screen’ You

One thing that makes video bloggers lose confidence in themselves is watching their videos back. The way you sound and the way you look to ‘you’ is actually a lot different to the ‘you’ that’s captured on camera. The ‘you’ that appears on camera is the real you and you need to embrace it. Learn the ways you phrase words, notice the intonation and pronunciation in your voice and make note of what you do with your face, hands and body when you talk. By understanding the habits you have when you present yourself on camera you can start to make changes to your performances and become more confident in how you’ll end up looking and sounding on video.

4.  Analyze Your Takes & Videos

Once you’ve become fluent in how you look and sound on screen you can start to make real changes to the way you present your videos. Analyse your takes and final videos, be cut-throat in what works and what doesn’t work. Make note of ideas to try out for your next take or episode and always strive to better yourself. When you start to analyse and criticize your own performances you will be able to better your video blogs every at every turn and gain more confidence as a result.

5.  Practice, Practice, Practice

There’s never a substitute for good, old fashioned practice. Try record one or two videos a day, just for your own benefit. Don’t upload them anywhere, just practice. If you practice one particular video a few times a day you’ll go from having a pretty poor video on Monday to having a fluent, confident and knowledgeable video come Sunday. This will help you to get comfortable with the whole recording process, get you to be more relaxed on camera and help you to make your video seem as confident as possible.

Summary

By following these five pointers you can start to become the confident, professional video blogger you hoped to be and make your video blogs just as popular as your established written blog.

Social Media Traffic

The easiest way to see what traffic is being sent from social media is to look at your website analytics software (like Google Analytics), at the referring sites section. I have yet to run across a client who is not getting any traffic from social media:

Baseline & Tracking Success

Using this technique is a great way to get a baseline before you start new social media campaigns, and is also especially important for measuring the success of your various social media tactics. You may also discover sites which are unexpectedly sending you traffic that you can leverage to increase sales or lead generation.

Converting Traffic

Once you have traffic coming to your website, the next step is to identify why and then leverage that to increase your sales. It can be especially helpful to have specific landing pages for each social media site where you spend time interacting, and certainly for each specific campaign.

Remember…

Social media can be a powerful tool for increasing traffic to your website, which you can then use to your advantage to increase sales.  But, don’t forget to use social media to engage and converse with your audience (not just advertise and promote to them). Building relationships can lead to more long term success than short-term traffic spikes.

(photo by epSos.de, on Flickr )

Everything in business is a learning process and advertising is no exception. Advertising promises to reach new potential customers or create an image for your company in the marketplace. What happens when the results don’t meet your expectations, you think back about where things went wrong.

Trust but Verify

Often advertisers will try to sell you ad space based upon the size of their audience, the geographic area of distribution, the frequency of publication, and so forth. This kind of information tells you nothing about their effectiveness for reaching your audience.

A good approach is to find previously published advertising material and check with the companies that advertised (even if the publication provides references). If you ‘re considering placing an ad in a tradeshow program guide, obtain last year’s guide and call the companies that advertised to learn what their results were.

Media salespeople always want to sell long-term contracts. Bulk purchasing is only good if you can use the entire package. Even if the discount is great, avoid such contracts until you know whether the channel works.

Gauge the Appropriateness of the Media

Check out who their advertisers are now. Have you ever noticed that ads on highway billboards and public bus panel are always the major players in some industry? How many local businesses advertise on a highway billboard? How many are instead Ford, Toyota, IBM, Microsoft, and Apple? There is a reason: these channels are very expensive and cost prohibitive to small companies.

Note when competitors or similar industries are running their promotions. They have a lot of experience advertising to the same audience and know best when to reach the targeted customer. Car dealers know to advertise late in a week because most people buy cars on weekends. Weight loss programs don’t advertise late in a week because no one wants to start a diet on Friday. Watch your email box. When do you receive notices about online store offers, newsletters, or notices about tradeshows?

A medical clinic and day spa service business advertised in the local newspapers and through email marketing. The clinic tried each of these approaches for a year or more before they disappeared from both media. Look back at previous advertisers and see what they did; it’s an indication of how well the media worked for them.

Media Buyer Beware of Free

If readers get something free, it’s not as effective for advertising as a publication with paid readers. All trade and newspapers want to tell you about how many readers they have, but many give away their publications. The readers don’t necessarily look at or read such publications.

My local town newspaper boasts a large circulation because it is mailed without charge it to all businesses and everyone’s houses. Likewise, many online information sites have free email newsletters, but that doesn’t mean the recipients read the newsletters. Similarly, organizations will report that a percentage of their membership rolls have particular demographics, but it doesn’t follow that those members have paid for those memberships. Some organizations offer free memberships to certain individuals just to be able to use them to promote the group for advertising rates and some consider those who signed up for the free newsletter or notifications to be members. Advertising rates reflect the audience size, more people means higher rates.

How Not to Compete with the Large Companies for Attention

Large companies tend to advertise in the largest reaching media. They will place ads in The Wall Street Journal or Time magazine, but not in local or regional publications. They will advertise on the largest websites, but not the smaller ones. It’s easier and more manageable for them to deal with national media organizations than a gaggle of small, niche, or local media companies. By contrast, targeted and niche marketing works best for startups, which have a limited budget. It’s better to dominate a subset of customers in a niche market or a locality and to be pervasively known within the niche than it is to build a little awareness everywhere.

Whenever the target audience has a lot of choices, it’s difficult to pinpoint the most promising ones. It’s harder to be effective in TV than in radio. In television, viewers are loyal to a program, not to a network. Most viewers have access to hundreds of channels and flip between them looking for an interesting show to watch. With radio, listeners usually have their favorite three stations and change between these few.

The concepts of frequency and reach apply equally to newspapers, television, radio, or the Internet. It’s more effective to dominate a time slot or customer segment. Instead of using the shotgun approach and advertising in twenty-five magazines, advertise in a few and give the appearance of being a national brand to that customer segment.

Advertising Strategy must be Consistent with Pricing

Consider the following real business examples. The average selling price of one startup’s product was $1,200, but the advertising cost to obtain a single lead was over $300. Competitors’ pricing was $1,800 and they were spending less than $156 to obtain an actual customer. That’s a big difference between obtaining a lead and actually closing on a sale. By contrast, if the product price is $25,000 and the advertising cost to obtain a lead was $200, then the producer may have a viable marketing strategy. The key to a viable strategy lies in the advertising cost per lead and advertising cost to obtain a sale, not in the size of the overall advertising budget. When choosing a promotion approach, consider whether it can be sustained long enough to prove the assumptions and whether if it fails, there is enough budget left to try a different approach.

Internet

Bring up the topic of pay-per-click (PPC) at any meeting about advertising, and you’ll hear immediate groans all around you. It doesn’t matter if you are talking about Google or Facebook ads. Also, bidding costs can be prohibitively high for many new businesses. Everyone, particularly startups, has spent large sums trying to figure out which keywords work best. And keeping page one ranking is often as expensive as per-per-click advertising. I was at a Constant Contact seminar recently, and the speaker said that the company spends $4 million of PPC and another $4 million on maintaining page one ranking. The company has $128 million in sales and just this type of advertising is over 6% of revenue. A common misconception is that the Internet is free, but effectiveness on the Internet is as expensive as in any traditional media. All media present their challenges.

DIY Approach is Usually More Costly

An agency or a media buyer will be expensive and most won’t even handle small companies, but despite the costs, it’s still less expensive than the DIY method. The reason is because they will be able to “ramp up” faster than you can without them. Agencies have many clients and are paid on commissions for the media buys. They are not going to get you better pricing, but they can get better positioning for your ads as well as help you with changing the original contract if the ads don’t work as expected. Advertising is an art. Even an agency will need to experiment with your product and company, and this is both a time consuming and costly trial and error process.

When dealing with an agency, startups need to be very proactive. They need to track the results diligently and feed them back to the agency. What worked well five years ago may not get results today, and what worked for a similar product might not work for yours.

Advertising is about Trade-Offs and Effectiveness

Effective advertising can only be achieved through experimentation. Advertising always seems too expensive and too slow at getting the desired results, but there’s no way around these unfortunate facts. It’s not just the cost of the media buys but also the cost of experimenting with the various channels, determining which one works best, and discovering how to optimize the performance of each channel. The selection of a publication is important, but so are where you place the ad, the size, the color scheme, the wording, and the competitors for the audience’s attention. You could place your ad in the right journal yet get little or no response. On the other hand, the perfect ad may not resonant with the audience because it’s in the wrong publication.

There is no right answer; many approaches can achieve the same results. It is, however, a zero sum game. Location is a good example. A location, either storefront or tradeshow floor position, can give a startup more visibility with passer-by traffic. With more visibility, less can be spent on paid advertising to get customers to the location. Likewise, there can be trade-offs between advertising versus labor and travel costs associated with direct marketing and sales.

(photo by lorenkerns, on Flickr)

Promotions and marketing have evolved very much over the past few years. We have seen the evolution of social media websites, discount businesses, and online incentives for customers. Advances in mobile broadband technology have brought the internet right into the hands of millions of consumers around the globe. Along with these tools, companies have found ways to entice customers to the store more frequently through price reductions, rebates, specials, etc. These new marketing tactics have enhanced sales tremendously for many businesses, even in times of a tough economy. Let’s take a look at the top approaches for marketing locally on a social level.

Facebook

Facebook has made some important changes to the way they involve local businesses in their social network. They hope to better capitalize on the hundreds of millions that update their status every day by incorporating a “location” tag right in the update. Users can not only tell the world what they are doing, but also where they are when they’re doing it. This is a vast improvement over using the now obsolete Places application to “check in” at a given location.

With this simple tag feature, Facebook is looking to get more users involved and excited about the “Where are you?” concept of their social interaction. This benefits businesses tremendously as more and more people go about revealing the restaurants, stores, and social venues they visit every day. Facebook will be able to more easily appeal to businesses that want to be a featured listing on the “location” suggestion box. These businesses can offer discounts to users or simply pay to be a suggested listing.

This is an excellent way to market locally, as companies can leverage Facebook to increase their visibility and sales. When consumers receive deals, they are more likely to shop in your local store. With the Facebook network reaching hundreds of millions of people every day, consumers are able to find the deals that match their interests and instantly update their location through their status update. The more discounts consumers find, the more they will want to shop. This helps to build brand loyalty with consumers that buy your product and like the product. Customer’s friends will also have access to view the deals once they determine where their friend is located. If done properly, a snowball effect will take place and attract an exponential amount of clients to your business.

Foursquare

Foursquare mayorships are similar to Facebook Places former “check ins” option. Since Facebook no longer runs a separate application, Foursquare is the premier “check in” and discounts app. Customers are awarded in Foursquare with free goods and discounts if they check into a business a certain number of times. For instance, you could check in 10 times at Burger Business and get a burger free or drink. The mayor title is offered to customers that visit often. However, employees, owners or managers cannot participate. Rewards may also be given to those in the special management section. Foursquare allows businesses to reward their loyal customers and increase their revenue with repeat business. This also encourages groups of people to converge onto a location at the same time. If you can bring a crowd, some companies will increase your reward.

Groupon

Customers using Groupon can earn discounts by buying with a group of people at once. They can redeem their discounted services or codes by printing out their coupons or by using their mobile phones. This encourages business by offering exclusive incentives to relevant customers within your area. The Groupon coupons allow customers to receive discounted services on salons, massages, dinner, and a lot more. Users enjoy the discounts and may encourage their friends to get free deals. Sometimes if the consumer encourages three or more friends to purchase the deal, they receive theirs free.

Conclusion

Facebook, Foursquare, and Groupon are all excellent marketing tools. Both the consumer and the company benefit tremendously from the use of these coupons. This form of marketing is becoming more successful as more companies attempt to drive new business to their doorstep.

Note: Photo courtesy of marcopako via FlickR Creative Commons.

http://www.wordstream.com/google-adwords

The Grader examines key campaign features including:

• Effective use of negative keywords
• Quality score for text ads and keywords targeted
• Click-through rates
• Impression share
• Long-tail keyword optimization
• Text ad optimization
• Landing page optimization
• PPC best practices.

The Grader’s interface is easy-to-use and clearly points out how you’re doing and where you can improve with your AdWords campaigns, providing an overall score similar to other graders:

By looking at the metrics for your campaign, the Grader is able to provide you with some feedback on how you can improve:

And by comparing your results to others with similar budgets, WordStream can give you feedback on how you stack up:

Give WordStream’s free AdWords Performance Grader a try and let us know what you think.