PLAYING IN TRAFFIC

Are You Using Deal of the Day Sites?

According to a recent New York Times article, the bloom may be off the rose when it comes to using deal of the day sites for your business.

The main reason, according to the article, is that many of the consumers who take advantage of the deals do not return as regular customers and pay full price as hoped.  Heavy discounts become the new normal and the businesses who participate say loyalty is non-existent and lasts only as long as the special deal lasts.

And as a business model, established sites like Groupon, DealSwarm, DealFind and others are being swamped by local competitors due to the relative ease of entry. 

New Jersey-based daily deal sites like FatDeals.biz and DailyDealNJBestBuys.com are only two examples of the spread of such sites which, while a boon to consumers, can have a dark side to businesses that offer deals at a loss in the hopes of attracting new customers to their stores, never to see them again after the deals expire.

WHAT WE RECOMMEND

In general, I’m a big fan of trying new things.  Some things will work, while others don’t, so you do more of what does and discontinue things that tank.

To minimize your exposure I would suggest trying a deal where your exposure is limited or requires some type of purchase to get the deal. 

Buy any sandwich get  a free soda, for example.  Buy 30 minutes of massage time, get another 30 minutes free.  That type of thing.

Bottom line:  try offering a deal you can live with for the shortest possible time commitment and make sure to capture additonal information when the person redeems it at the store, if possible, such as offering them additional deals by signing up for your in-house email newsletter or by liking your Facebook page.  Because all the deal sites “own” the customer already, having already gotten them to sign up for the deals via email, and the customers are under no further obligation to opt-in to your marketing message beyond handing you the coupon they’ve received.  So make it worth their while by offering either additional deals or even useful information.

Be creative. Test the waters.  And please let us know what’s working and what’s not by sharing it with us either here on our blog or by visiting our Facebook page HERE.

Posted in email marketing, Marketing, Sales, Social Media Marketing | 1 Comment »

How Social Media Impacts Google Search

As we recently wrote in a past blog post about the impact of social media on search engine results, there’s no denying that social media tweets, shares and posts are now counted towards a page’s rankings in the search engines.  Simply put, a page that is shared on LinkedIn or tweeted on Twitter will rank higher than a page that is not, all other factors (such as inbound links, keywords etc) being equal.

While social media is not a deciding factor in higher page rankings it is clearly a contributing factor as communicated by Google, Bing and Yahoo themselves in the Danny Sullivan interview quoted here.

So here’s a video that explains very clearly, in Google’s own words, how social media is impacting search:

PLEASE NOTE: in order to see the effects of social media in your searches you must be logged into Google. Without being logged in, Google will not know who you are and will not be able to tailor your search engine results. When checking your own SEO it’s best NOT to be logged in so you will see the results that people who are not logged in will see.  Are you seeing the results of social search in your own SEO efforts?  Either comment below or post on our FACEBOOK page here.

Posted in SEO, Social Media Marketing | 3 Comments »

How Social Media Impacts SEO

The search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing are increasingly giving creedence to social media links and postings as a measure of search relevancy.

Similarly to the way that inbound links are a measure of a website’s importance, social media participation has probably surpassed the importance of META tags as a way to judge the search relevancy of a particular website.

In a recent article by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land,  Sullivan actually interviewed Google and Bing about the impact of social media on a site’s SEO and each acknowledged that social media was having an impact on how they calculated search results:

Bing:

We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.

Google:

Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article.

The same applied to public areas of Facebook, like your profile, but not to the posts on your Facebook Wall because they are behind the gated community and are are not indexed.

The bottom line:  Participation in Social media is a worthwhile effort if it makes sense for your particular type of business.  While I personally don’t think that Facebook is great for business to business efforts, business to consumer efforts on Facebook are having a temendously positive impact.  But both of them (Twitter or Facebook) will have residual SEO value independent of the main benefits of enagagement, sharing, etc.  And efforts like tweeting, posting videos on YouTube with fleshed out descriptions and keyword tags, as well as publishing fully-realized public profiles on LinkinIn are having a real impact on search results, too.  If you haven’t gotten involved in social media marketing for your business yet, get started.  If you are engaging in social media marketing efforts for your business, great.  Do it even more!

Posted in Marketing, Social Media Marketing | 2 Comments »

Best of Both Worlds: Email Marketing and Social Media

 As I get ready to present a workshop titled, “Email Marketing – the Original Social Media” at the upcoming BlogPaws conference, I was heartened to find this recent study conducted by Lyris and reported by eMarketer.com.

The gist is that Social Media Marketing (SMM) combined with email marketing gives the sometimes-hard-to-quantify SMM a tangible metric to measure success (or failure).

In response to the question, “If you used social media together with email marketing to get better results this last year, how much better were your results?”

21% reported “significantly better” and 33% “somewhat better.”

But the stat that I liked the best was that 29% were not combining the two at all, meaning there’s lots of room for growth!

Also interesting and a validation of what SamsonMedia.net been doing for over a year now, is combining email sign-ups with custom Facebook pages which a full 80% of respondents replied was the best one-two punch in their social media marketing efforts.

Our own experiments in this area bear this out, especially when combined with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising on Facebook.

We found that driving traffic via PPC to a custom landing page on Facebook not only increased our “likes” to the page (another form of opt-in marketing) but nearly doubled our daily rate of email sign-ups.

What are you finding when you’ve combined SMM with email marketing?  Please share your results in the comments box below or on our Facebook page HERE.

Posted in email marketing, Social Media Marketing | 2 Comments »

Email Autoresponders Used to Help Author Sell Books

When Susan P. Ascher, President of the Ascher Group, wanted help selling her new book on Amazon.com, we worked with our partners at publishing company WoodPecker Press to get the book listed and sold on Amazon.com via the “Fullfillment By Amazon” program which involves shipping inventory to the Amazon warehouses and having them handle all aspects of selling and shipping the book.  We also created and configured the book, titled, Dude, Seriously, It’s NOT All About You, for the Kindle.

But the cornerstone of the online marketing program revolves around a series of email autoresponders that dispense exerpts from the book in a brief and entertaining manner to, in effect, let people sample the book before buying.

The sign-up for the email autoresponder, using Aweber, our favorite email marketing tool, will automatically dispense 3 free tips from the book when someone signs up at the company website.

Posted in email marketing | 2 Comments »