Understand Your Traffic Streams

If there is one thing that we would like you to take away from this blog post, it is that you cannot use generalizations when it comes to tracking and testing your marketing efforts. You really need to understand where your traffic streams are coming from and micromanage each stream, effectively, if you want to make an overall improvement in your performance. It makes little sense to try and establish averages over a number of different initiatives, just so that you can see how you are doing in overall terms.

We always seem under pressure to come up with statistics, to show that we are being productive with our time or initiatives or to prove that the money truly is “well spent.” The truth is that any analytics program worth its salt will enable you to drill down and really analyze every single visitor.

If you favor Google Analytics, you may have one of those plug-ins added to your blog to show you how you are doing through a summarized form, complete with miniature graph over the last 30 days. You will see your average “bounce rate,” and this may send you running for the hills, but after all what use are these figures by themselves?

The whole purpose of tracking and testing is to make changes. For sure, you could be the smartest marketer in creation or just plain lucky, find that your promotional and advertising methods work right out of the box and you need to do little to modify. We all know marketing a business is about trial and error and even the most educated and successful among us make mistakes and need to make changes. Be prepared to understand that you need to track each initiative before you put it in place, associate results with that particular track and you must be able to differentiate those results from any other concurrent initiative.

It is important to develop separate landing pages and associated anchor text, crucial reference points to enable you to quickly see where consummated sales originate. Remember also that a good proportion of visitors to your site will be poorly qualified and these will certainly help to skew your conversion rates.

If you are lucky enough to have a very highly trafficked site and have not taken steps to differentiate your sources, you will find it very difficult to move forward with any confidence. Whatever you may do to try and increase conversion rates in one particular area will be difficult to quantify as your average conversion rate, bounce rate or simple visitor rate will tend to absorb your efforts.

If you have not set up a trackable, definable list of goals and events and your landing pages are insufficiently identified, then it may be time for you to start afresh, redefine your objectives, come up with a plan and a means to track it and set a future date to start understanding and manipulating your traffic streams correctly.

Are all your traffic streams profitable - if not which ones are dragging you down?

Adam Toren

Be Different and Stand Out

As an entrepreneur, how often have you tried simply tinkering with your price to see if you can gain just a little bit of advantage over your competitors? Truth be told, this is how we all tend to think at first reaction, as the almighty dollar always dictates a biased decision. But of course it does not. In any wildly cluttered marketplace, where price based marketing is prominent and is often shut out by the consumer, the key is differentiation. Don’t try and compete on price alone, but make sure your organization has something very distinctive to offer that others do not.

We are not trying to say that price is irrelevant and you will surely be disappointed if your pricing structure is badly skewed, but there comes a point when the consumer makes a decision based on other factors as well. If you have been able to differentiate your operation sufficiently, then in the ultimate scenario, price becomes irrelevant.

Are you aware of who your competitors are? Many an entrepreneur is not really able to answer that question, but this form of intelligence is not difficult to gather and you should always be aware of how others are seeking to reach your targets. If you do not know the “modus operandi” of your competitors, you will be badly placed should they choose to launch an initiative to try and steal your revenues. Setting yourself apart from the competition will invariably require you to reassess how you handle all your business processes, how you interact with your clients, and how you treat your relationships. You must have a hands on and conversational relationship with your clients and ensure that you are communicating what sets you apart.

If you just focus on price, how much of a difference are you likely to make? You could pare your expenses to the bone and imagine that you could make up what you’re losing though additional clientèle. Would your existing clients take a dim view of this? There is a danger that you could project yourself as budget quality, driving down the perceived value of your services. In reality, the pure profit involved when you tinker around with marginal price differences could be more than accounted for by a concerted effort to differentiate your service.

Overdeliver at everything that you do, to the point when people wonder just how you can manage to do this and still maintain a profit. This kind of creativity does not have to be the domain of those late-night infomercials on television, which promise you more and more in terms of savings and add-ons, rapidly creating the hook. Take a good look at what your competitors are doing and do it better, or provide distinct value when they are not.

How do you differentiate?

Adam Toren

What to Expect From Social Media Marketing in 2010

If 2008 was the year of beginnings and 2009 was the year of revelations, then 2010 is likely to be the year when social media marketing finally reaches its stride. It’s all about connecting and the opportunities for organizations that truly embrace the idea of social marketing are almost limitless. In fairly short order, the Internet has gone from the role of a handy source for information to a must-have, finger on the pulse, essential way of keeping in touch with everyone and everything. Expect real opportunities to emerge now that we have ways to interact in real-time.

The emergence of the iPhone and other smart phone alternatives has helped to introduce the concept of instantaneous gratification to millions of people. We live in a “now” culture and want instant answers to our thoughts, questions and problems. Commercial operations will be quick to exploit this urgency and we can expect to see applications and other solutions emerge, enabling us to convert this online connectivity to off-line action. For example, geo-targeted, personalized delivery of product or service solutions will become more commonplace, enabling you to receive a notice on your smartphone suggesting you interact with the retailer in your immediate locality based on your previous habits and propensities.

There’s so much data available within social networking now that it will be leveraged and used in ever more sophisticated fashion during 2010 and beyond. Micromarkets will emerge with dizzying regularity as this information is immediately converted from raw data to business opportunities. Trends will be identified as they are happening and as applications and solutions become more and more sophisticated there will be an increasing number of opportunities for smart and forward thinking businesses to make money, more quickly as they capitalize.

The Internet has long been fueled by the thirst for information and by the search mantra, but that information has historically been less than current. This will now change, as soaring Twitter use provides up to the second relevancy and data availability to Google and Bing search engine platforms. Real-time results will ensure that the would-be purchaser is even more educated and ready to buy products or services provided by the switched on entrepreneur.

The pace of technological change is so dizzying. At the beginning of 2010 we await with keen interest the likely arrival of the next generation of communication tools, possibly led by the iSlate product from Apple. Before long, everyone will have their own fully functional, always connected personal computing device at the right hand, where solutions and answers are only a second or so away. The mobile web will begin to complete the process of change. No longer will we have to make a special effort to do our research and formulate our buying decisions and we will be prompted by eager sellers to make a buying decision right now.

Social media platforms will be the conduit of change in 2010.

Adam Toren

A Charity Raises Money for Haiti Through Text Message Campaign

We were all shocked and saddened to hear of the events in Haiti. This poor country never seems to catch a break. In hurricane season it always seem to get a hit from a major cyclone and this can lead to plenty of damage, destruction caused by flooding and an awful number of casualties and deaths. However, even some of the worst cyclones will pale into insignificance when compared with the damage that we are seeing from this magnitude 7.0 earthquake.

As the drama is unfolding, we are coming to the awful realization that this is likely to be one of the worst natural disasters in living memory. We dread to look at the news on a daily basis and to see just how many people are left homeless with nowhere to go, just wandering around with a few possessions, that they were able to salvage to comfort them. Still worse, of course, is the growing death toll. This is likely to be a terrible testament to the wrath of mother nature and as the numbers grow and events unfold, we will be left to wonder how such natural events can happen in a faithful world.

Thankfully, the human race is very philanthropic. We naturally want to look after our neighbor in crisis and somehow this horror seems that much more real to us, as this island nation is very close to the United States, after all.

As with any major event taking place these days, news of disaster spread very quickly through social media, with reports emerging from the region through Twitter posts and other messages. Our upgraded ability to communicate can have a positive effect through all this carnage as well. A number of text messaging campaigns have emerged, through which you can pledge a certain amount of money by just sending a simple text message. This is a really easy way of contributing and showing that we all care and is a whole lot easier than the traditional method of seeking out a website and working out for yourself how to contribute.

We look at our new communication tools, our all-encompassing smart phones and our ability to socially engage with each other and imagine many ways that our “new world” can enhance our lives. Now we can see an additional use, a way to reach out to those who are very much less fortunate than we are, at their time of need.

The Red Cross has already raised more than $8 million as of Friday morning, January 15th for this essential cause. Donations may be made, a $10 value at a time, through a simple texting effort. The donation is added to your phone bill. The Red Cross is also adding $1 million from its international response fund to this ever-growing pile of money that will surely help to make a difference as that country begins the long, long road to getting back on its feet. It’s amazing to hear that the amount raised so far for this initiative is more than double the entire amount raised throughout 2009 via this method - and all within just a few days.

If you want to help, text “HAITI” to 90999 and give a $10 donation to the Red Cross.

Here are some other alternatives as well:

Text “YELE” to 501501 to donate $5 to the Yele Haiti foundation.
Text “HAITI” to 20222 to donate $10 to the Clinton Foundation Haiti Relief Fund.
Text “HAITI” to 85944 to donate $10 to the International Medical Corps.
Text “HAITI” to 25383 to donate $5 to the International Rescue Committee.

Adam Toren

A Picture Tells a Thousand Words

When you see some of the most creative infographics around today, it’s little wonder that they say that people skim through webpages, focusing on graphics, rather than getting themselves absorbed in all the text. This should tell us all a story, as while the written word is certainly always “king” as we know, if we jam too much of it into one particular visual screen, then the eyes of our dear viewers will tend to glaze over it. Always intersperse your text creatively with graphics and photos and don’t forget that captions can be very powerful, as the eyes will almost certainly focus on the explanation for the presented photograph on page.

Infographics represent intelligent and very creative ways to explain subjects that are, in some cases, rather difficult to get your mind around. We present some of the “cooler” ones here for your consumption.

Over at Digg Labs, the creative guys and gals there have come up with a colored wheel which allows you to interact and select a day, month and year, to be presented with the top 10 stories by category on any given day. Check it out, but be warned you could spend a lot of time here!

While we know that Twitter is hot stuff, did you know that only five of 100 community members can be classified as really active? Maybe this graphic and the information here will help you to visualize it better?

Still on the subject of Twitter, how does it stack up against the big daddy, Facebook?
This graphic sums it up very succinctly. For example, did you know that Facebook has almost as many members as there are people living in Indonesia?

If you maintain an active blog, as hopefully you do, you may have wondered where those blog posts actually go to and how pinging services interact with your post once you have created it. We found this great interactive graphic tutorial at wired.com, which should actually be required reading or viewing for all Internet marketers. It really helps you to get a handle on the lifecycle and might help you to prepare your blogging campaigns more successfully.

The Conversation Prism is an inspirational creation, designed to graphically depict the art of listening, learning and sharing. It is visually very attractive as you can see and is available to buy as a really neat wall poster should you wish. Each one of the leaves represents an element of communication and a social media resource, with the inner circles depicting the style of communication and method, all leading back to the central brand. A great creation by Brian Solis.

Explore the social media landscape at fredcavazza.net and see which sites are linked according to purpose or intent. A handy little graphic to remind you which social media tools or services would be most appropriate for your needs.

Have you spied any cool infographics? Let us know.

Adam Toren

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