Best Internet Marketing Techniques – A Case Study

Found this great article where a small company tried out a bunch of different marketing techniques to see what worked:

http://triad-inc.com/blog/best-internet-marketing-techniques-a-case-study/

From my own experience so far, I think they're results are pretty common.

Facebook Contest Guidelines

http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php

I've been looking into running Facebook promotions recently and came across Facebook's official contest guidelines. Surprisingly, they're pretty restrictive:

1. You must not use Facebook features or functionality as a promotion’s registration or entry mechanism.  For example, the act of liking a Page or checking in to a Place cannot automatically register or enter a promotion participant.
    
2. You must not condition registration or entry upon the user taking any action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page, checking in to a Place, or connecting to your app.  For example, you must not condition registration or entry upon the user liking a Wall post, or commenting or uploading a photo on a Wall.
    
3. You must not use Facebook features or functionality, such as the Like button, as a voting mechanism for a promotion.
    
4. You must not notify winners through Facebook, such as through Facebook messages, chat, or posts on profiles or Pages.

Facebook doesn't allow you to run a promotion where you ask users to upload photos. For example, if you ran a T-Shirt company and ran a contest asking users to upload pictures of themselves wearing your T-Shirts as a way to promote community participation, you're out of luck.

You also can't have users enter automatically enter if they 'Like' your company page. Although, you can make 'being a fan' of your page a condition for entry.

Hmm... interesting.

QR Codes: 26 MUST-HAVE Facts

Thought I would share this excellent link on QR Codes that outlines their current growth in North America. It also has a whole bunch of great statistics. Definitely a must read for anyone thinking about using QR codes in their marketing strategy:

http://heidicohen.com/qr-code-data/

What are Google AdWords and are they worth it?

What are Google Ads? 

You've almost certainly seen them before. Google Ads or Adwords are those little ads you see on the right side of your search results whenever you search for something on Google. They also appear on other Google related pages like Youtube (the ones that pop up when you play a video) and my blog (those ads on the top right). It's one of the most popular places to advertise on the web.

(here's a delicious example)

Here's how it works:

Google Adwords lets you set the advertising budget to whatever you want. The placement of these ads works like an auction. You place a bid for how much you’d pay for someone to click on your ad. Everyone else who is targeting your audience and topic is bidding against you. Each time someone searches for something related to your topic the auction begins for who’s ad will be shown to them. (Keep in mind these auctions happen billions of times a day). You might not win every auction but you’re bound to win some as competing advertisers use up their budgets or change their bids, etc. It all depends on how much you bid and how popular our targets and topics are.

For example, let's say we set a daily budget of $5. Then we set what our maximum auction bid is per auction is. Let's say $.50. Assuming our bid amount wins some of these auctions, once 10 people clicked on our ad, our ad would stop being displayed for the day. Then it all resets the next day.

Google Adword ads can cost whatever you want. However, how many clicks you get is dependent on how many of these mini auctions you win. 

So is Google Ads worth it?

A few months ago I got a coupon for $100 of free advertising to use with Google Adwords. So I decided to give it a shot for a company I've been working for. Google tends to send these coupons out when you start using Google Analytics (a topic for another day).

What I found is that Google Adwords works exactly as advertised. The ads go out and people click on them. But it might not be worth it. 

It all comes down to how much each click is going to cost you, and how much you're willing to pay for it. With the ad that I tried, I had a daily budget of $5.00 a day and was getting 10 clicks daily ($.50 a click). If I bid less, I would barely get any clicks. $.50 seemed to be the sweet spot. 

I found that in my case it wasn't worth paying $.50 a click. However, if I was paying $.10 then it might have been worth it or if I had a budget of $1000 a months instead of $100.  For a different topic/brand it could very well be the best way to advertise. If you ever come across one of these free $100 coupons then it's definitely worth it.

What I can say for sure is that using Google Ads will definitely increase brand awareness. $100 and within one month my ad was seen over 355,000 times. It's definitely worth a shot.

Goals Goals Goals

Why are you bothering with this social media stuff?

If you're getting into this social media stuff you need to ask yourself why. The obvious answer is that you want to increase business. However, you might not see a noticeable difference after creating social media content for the first few months. Having a Facebook page or a Twitter feed might not increase sales 10% but does that mean your efforts are failing? 

I bring this up because you need to decide from the start what you're trying to accomplish in order to define how to succeed with this stuff. There might not be a noticeable bump in sales from creating a Facebook or Twitter community but you might be benefiting in other ways. You could be benefiting by creating brand awareness or an identity for your company.

There's no simple way to define social media success so you need to define what you're trying to accomplish right from the start. You need to set goals. 

For example, your goals might be to:

• increase Twitter followers
• increase Facebook fans
• create brand identity
• create a community for customers to discuss your product 
• increase traffic to your main website
• increase brand awareness

Let's be serious: overall your goal is going to be to increase sales. What I'm saying is that it might not be that easy to measure for the first few months and you don't want to give up too soon. You also don't want to put in too many hours either. By creating goals you can help focus your social media content and help measure your progress as you go along. 

My experience in social media so far is that building a following from scratch and seeing results is a slow process but that it does pay off. I'll give some real world examples in future posts...

How to Make a Facebook Landing Page

Earlier, I talked about Facebook Landing pages. Now it's time to give a quick tutorial. Remember that graphic designer I said you'll need? You're going to need them along with a little bit of technical savvy to get through this. I'll try to make it easy for you though.

Here's the step by step process:

To create a Facebook Landing page you need to add a Facebook application. First off, you'll need to navigate to your company page. Once logged into Facebook, click on Account at the top right of your screen and then click Manage Pages from the drop down menu. Then click the appropriate Go to Page button for the page you want to edit.

From your company page, click on Edit Page on the left side of the screen.

When you click on Edit Page, it should bring you to a page where you can edit your company info. If you look along the left side you should see a link for Apps. Click on that. 

This should then bring you to a list of the default Facebook applications you currently have on your page. Things like Photos, Videos, etc. We need to add something called Static FBML - by Facebook.  From this page, click on Browse more applications at the bottom of the list.

Don't worry, we're gettin' there.

From the Browse Applications screen type in Static FBML in the search box at the top left. It should then bring up a few results. The one you want is called Static FBML by Facebook. 

Clicking on Static FBML should bring you to the App homepage. From here on the left side of the screen click on Add to My Page and from the window that pops up click on Add to Page.

You've now added what is soon going to be your Facebook Landing page. If you go back to your company page you should now see a new tab called FBML 1

The easy part's done. Now we move on to how to use this FBML app thingy.

From your company page, click on Edit Page on the left side of the screen and then click Apps again. You should see your list of Facebook apps but this time, you should see one called FBML - FBML. This is the app we just added. Now click on Go to App just underneath it.

Here's where things start to get a little tricky. This is where you'll need to know a little bit of HTML. Depending on your level of skill programming HTML and other web languages you can do some pretty cool things.I'm going to explain how to create a simple landing page that will link to your website and I'll explain more complicated pages in future posts.  I'll keep it simple here though.

You should now come to a page that looks like this:

Box Title is going to be the name of the tab. You'll want to rename it to something like Welcome or What's New? It's up to you so use your imagination.

The empty box is where we need to put in a little bit of HTML code. We're going to keep it simple and make the tab display a graphic that links to your website. I'll provide a test image if you haven't created one yet.

If you are creating a landing page graphic I suggest creating an image in GIMP or Adobe Photoshop with the dimensions 490 x 651 (pixels). The maximum width is 520 pixels for a Facebook page and you can make them as long as you like. I recommend 490 x 651 to start with since it gives a nice and even look. Once you have your graphic, either upload it to your own webserver or use www.tinypic.com and upload it there to generate an image link.

In the FBML box copy and paste the following:

<a href="http://www.yourwebsite.com"><img src="http://i55.tinypic.com/r1y6c0.jpg"></a>

Replace http://www.yourwebsite.com with your website address or the link that you want your landing page to link to. Replace http://i55.tinypic.com/r1y6c0.jpg with your landing page graphic. Currently the image link goes to a sample graphic you can use until you make your own.

Once you've done that click on Save Changes at the bottom and you've now got your first landing page. Go back to your company page and click on the new tab (the one you renamed to Welcome or What's New?) You should now see something like this:

If you click on the page it should now take you to your own website. 

We're so close to being done! There's just one more step. We just need to make this the default page that comes up when someone visits your company Facebook page.

From your company page click on the tab for your Wall. Then click on the Settings button near the top of the wall. This will bring up the default setting for visitors coming to your page.  You should see a drop down menu next to Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else. From the menu select your landing page from the list.

Ta-da! Your first Facebook Landing page is done!

Everyone who visits your Facebook page for the first time will be greeted by your fancy landing tab. They'll then be so impressed with your skills that they will sing your praises and shower you with gold, frankincense, and myrrh!

There's a lot more to talk about with these landing pages including all the neat things you can and can't do with them. I'll post some tips and tricks in the future. 

What are QR Codes?

Looks like a bad abstract painting eh?

QR codes are a lot like the bar codes you'd find on the back of a can of soup. They can contain a ton of information but only if you know how to read that information. Luckily, anyone with a fancy smartphone like an iPhone or Blackberry has the ability to read them. 

So why should you care?

Well, these QR codes can be used to do some pretty neat things. When you scan a QR code with your smartphone it returns information back in the form of any of the following:

• a text message
• a calendar event
• a URL
• contact information
• an SMS
• a geo-location
• a phone number
• a wifi network

Imagine that a customer walks into a store, looks and the shelf and sees your product. They're not sure whether they want to buy it or not so they scan the QR code which then takes them to a webpage full of glorious reviews of your product. Or maybe they walk into a store only to find that they're all out of the style they want.  They then scan the QR code on a different style which then takes them to a website outlining which stores currently have that style in stock. There are a ton of possibilities. You just have to be creative. You could even use them just to send a secret messages to your friends, your boss, or the KGB. 

Now, you'll need to have a QR Code Scanner app on your smartphone to read them but most of these are free and easy to get (search for QR Code Scanner on your Blackberry App World of iPhone App Store). 
Once you have the app, it'll use your phone's camera feature to take a picture of the code. You click a button to take the picture and it'll instantly return something back to you.

Creating and using a QR code is super easy and best of all FREE! 

(no licensing required)

There are a few websites out there with QR code generators but I found this one to be the simplest: http://zxing.appspot.com/generator/ .   I recommend downloading a QR Scanner App and play around generating different codes to see they're effect. I think the most useful one though is the ability to have someone get directed right to your website or a specific page on your website.

QR Codes are definitely something to consider sticking on your packaging, advertisements, website, or wherever. They're a free and simple way to engage customers in a tech-savvy way.

Neat eh?