2012 Direct Marketing Trends – Marketing is Here to Stay

MARKETING IS BACK AND HERE TO STAY!  Yes….Marketers can start to rest easy knowing that businesses are starting to see the value of marketing again.  By reducing marketing budgets over the past two years, companies are seeing a reduction in overall sales and are not happy!  They are starting to be proactive and seek out professional marketers to help them meet their sales objectives. Without marketing…visibility is limited and new opportunities dry up quickly.   Perhaps….CEO’s had to see for themselves the outcome of not marketing their product/service.   As they say “It All Happens For A Reason”.  Perhaps….Management has finally accepted the fact that you can’t live without marketing forever.

Where are we headed in 2012?

Marketing reports are showing that companies have added on new marketing programs in 2012 to include new collateral development, direct mail, and increased trade show presence.  For example, many companies are investing in new trade show booth designs and new glossy 4-color brochures to re-brand their company image.  Companies that have not invested in any marketing activities for the last 5-10 years are coming forward and asking marketers to help steer them in the right direction.  We are seeing more marketing positions open up and marketing consultants are starting to see an increase in their client base.

As stated by The Ballantine Corporation, an area of direct marketing that is projected to see a huge focus in 2012 is targeting and personalization.  It all comes down to relevancy and prospects are more likely to respond if the topic is relevant to them.  They also mentioned another key factor in target marketing in 2012 will be trigger marketing.   Trigger marketing is when specific messages are sent to a prospect/customer based on the trigger of a certain criteria. An example would be a birthday where you receive a direct mail piece offering a discount off of dinner.

Another interesting fact is that people have moved past their negative feelings about direct mail and are starting to respond again.  With the overload of emails in our inboxes, prospects prefer other methods of direct marketing.   The goal is to be smart with your marketing and make sure you are sending relevant messages/offers to your target audience.

Tailored URL’s (PURLs) are also a big item in 2012.  This includes a dedicated url that provides prospects with a web landing page that is customized to their needs.   It can include their name, special offers, information on previous purchases, or a special message just for them.  It’s the wave of the future.

With the buy in from management and CEO’s, marketers can work their magic and create unique marketing campaigns for their clients.   It’s a team effort all around and with the support of the key players, there is no end to a marketer’s success.  The goal should be to keep trying new tactics and find out what works best.  As long as you test and show results for your campaigns….there is nothing to worry about in 2012!

Author: 

Monique Merhige is the President of Infusion Direct Marketing & Advertising, Inc.  She has over 15 years of marketing communications experience with technology companies ranging from small service firms and equipment manufacturers to a 1.5 Billion dollar division of Motorola.  Infusion is a marketing consulting firm that specializes in the security industry and delivers marketing solutions that include Public Relations, Direct Marketing, Branding, Collateral Development, and Social Media Marketing.  Visit:  www.infusiondirect.com or call 631-846-1558

Sources:

• The Ballantine Corporation: Direct Marketing Trends for 2012
• DM NEWS Marketing Trends Get Personal in 2012
• Deliver Magazine Modern Mail
• Image: www.brainstormstudio.com

Funding Your Freelance Writing Business

The greatest aspect of funding your freelance writing business is that you are only as limited as your ambitions, creative talents and the time it takes you to complete writing projects. As a freelance writer you likely have already gained some knowledge on what it takes to win larger projects as well as specific knowledge different clients seek.

It is imperative to create a business plan and set aside some of your income from freelance writing projects. Once you begin building it, funding a small online business will be as easy as paying writers as they complete projects.  When considering funding your freelance writing business, realize that it is a distinct possibility that others may not have the ethical practices you have. Clients have been known to run off without pay, so be prepared emotionally and financially for that possibility as well.

The Basic Requirements

Before you delve into creating a small online business of your own in the writing niche, you need a reliable internet connection, an up-to-date computer and the willingness to work longer hours than you would as a part-time or even a full-time freelance writer. You will likely need at least two to four hours per day to have enough success to ensure your failures are not ‘end-alls’ for your company.

Build on Your Good Name

Outsourcing clients who are happy with you and your team may need larger projects completed. They could also have other affiliates that do. As your own writing career becomes more lucrative, improve upon the portfolios and profiles of your writer-base. Once you have a steady amount of work on your own, strike out from the freelance employee niche and become a freelance employer. Make sure that prospective employers understand you may be a part of a writing group or small online business that caters to clients with larger content needs.

Outsourcing Ethically

Never mislead a client if you are outsourcing jobs they give you. This is not only unethical but can end up costing you your reputation. If a client has agreed that your work is up to their standards and you turn in work from another writer who did not meet those standards, the client will assume you lack consistency and may decide to terminate your contract. Fair assumption, you didn’t supply consistent content, regardless of who created it. On many freelance work sites, the client would win that disagreement in a moderation process.

However, once you have clients with whom you have made clear you will have a group of writers on their project, make sure that each writer‘s work lives up to the standards that you originally provided. This may require that you spend less time writing and a bit more proofreading the work of others. Be financially prepared with a bit of overhead from your own completed assignments in case the proofing or approval process takes a bit longer with larger orders. It will. Expect to spend at least a couple hours per day doing not much else for even the smallest projects.

Don’t Multitask Too Much

The freelance writing world is full of competent writers and websites that clients can be fully satisfied with. For this reason it will become your personal responsibility to see that your freelance writing business stands out among others. Before you go from employee to employer, you may also want to consider building up some funds to invest in marketing. Without a bit of help, the time you spent hunting, managing, and completing projects, will go from around two hours per day to ten. You can not add the much needed element of marketing on top of your many other responsibilities and expect any of them to be highly-effective. You can also expect to find yourself failing at both ends if you do. Certainly be hands-on when it comes to learning how the marketing process works. You will eventually have the time to give that area of your business far more consideration.

Funding your freelance writing business will become much easier if you demand high standards from your employees and perhaps even set up a series of rewards for consistently meeting those high standards. This will return your own private working time back to you, which you can turn over to completing the projects that will be funding your freelance writing business.

Get Started Here @DBMEi

There may be no other place better to start than right here on DBMEi if you are searching for some free freelance writer education as well as practices that you should inject into your own Freelance Writing Business.  Currently we have Megan Campbell, Vanessa Canner,  Leigh Egan, & Megan Harriswho, along with me, all write on Freelance writing  topics here @DBMEi.

Sources:

• Turning Freelance Writing into a Business
• Home Business Ideas
• Set Your Freelance Writing Goals for 2013

Author:
Joy Lynskey is the owner of JRL Solutions, a copywriting and content management company based in Bedford, Virginia. JRL Solutions hosts a Freelance Writers Education Blog that is managed by direct and guest posting. Joy is the Content Manager and Editor for Puglisi Consulting Group at Digital Brand Marketing Education. Joy regularly works in SMM via freelance consulting  private clients with their social media campaigns. @JoyLynskey

Understand the Basics of SEO: Why Geo and Subject Domain Names Rock!

Search Engines are in the business of helping a user find the content they are looking for! If you keep this in mind you’ll start off with a great relationship with the Search Engines and the Visitors to your site.

Websites have three main areas you’ll want to really pay attention to:

1. Structure
2. Content
3. References

As a website owner you’ll want this to be how you operate your lead generation through the search engines. Unless you’re an adult site, gambling or daily deal, people will not generally respond to a website about Plumbing when they were searching for Pizza.

Time and Money are important, you’ll get alot further if you concentrate your resources were they should be and where they will produce the highest rate of conversion. If you’re going to chase down multiple areas and categories do it in a way that provides unique, useful and provides a genuine experience for the user.

SEO Tip: Geo & Subject Domains > Brand Domains

An example of how this has been done is through domain masking and forwarding. Take the Domain PapaJohns.com, now that’s a great domain because people looking for “papa john’s” will find exactly what they are looking for, but will they still find it if they put in “MyTown Pizza” like “Brooklyn Pizza”, “Chicago Pizza”?

Here is an example of how we use forwarding on Digital Brand Marketing Education, the publically promoted domain is dbmei.com and that makes sense because it is short and simple. It makes for easy emails and sharing in social media without having to shorten the domain. However When you land on the site, you notice the actual domain changes to digitalbrandmarketing.com

Search Engines give a lot of value to domains, after all if you’re naming the site that, then those words must be relevant. In our case we want people looking for “Digital, Brand and/or Marketing”  to find our publication and those keywords fit perfectly with our content.

If you own Jerry’s Seafood.com, and your restaurant is in the town or geographic location of East Hampton, you might want to think about masking or forwarding the domain to easthamptonseafood.com or easthamptonseafoodrestaurant.com.

This is just one tip to help with your sites SEO, obviously you want the title tags, content, etc to all also fit this search term.

 

Sources:

• Why Keyword Domains Are Better for SEO
• Domain Names in Action
• Keywords in the Domain Name

How Do You Do It? – My Super-Secret (shh!) 6 Tips for Blogging Success

Check out these mind-blowing statistics on this blog:

• 1,085 Posts
• Over 72,000 viewers to date
• In nationwide syndication
• Publishes on the Kindle
• Publishes 7 days a week and mostly twice on weekdays (but not on holidays)

Those stats are for the extremely popular blog, Fearless Competitor. Then the question invariably comes up. “We struggle to post once a week. How many writers do you have for Fearless Competitor?” – most expect 8 or more.

The answer is One. One man. The Fearless Competitor!

The next comment is something we hear frequently. How the Hell does one person create so many great posts? I struggle to post once a week!

How Do You Do It?

(In fact, Mike Volpe, Chief Marketing Officer at Hubspot said to me “Jeff, at Hubspot we have many writers for our blog and it publishes frequently. But you are almost as prolific and you’re just one person. I have no idea how you do it.” When you can stump Mike Volpe, you’re doing something right. And Mike invited me to appear on HubspotTV, now called Marketing Update.)

In this post, I’ll share 6 tips on how YOU can learn to be a VERY prolific blogger too. And for each tip, we share an example post from Fearless Competitor, so you can see how it is done.

1. Create one or more weekly events, shows, etc.
Create a regular weekly show – same day, same time each week. Keep doing it. We created the B2B marketing show “Laugh and Learn with Find New Customers“. It runs every Friday at 11am ET. If you post 5 times a week, you’re 20% done.

2. Find inspiration in everything
Read a great article or find a great TV show? Read an interesting blog article? Is there a lesson in it? Then write about your thoughts. Check out ‘5 Lessons a B2B Marketer Can Learn from “Breaking Bad.”’

3. Report on the news
What’s happening in your industry? (Act-On Software buys MarketBridge; Eloqua files to go public.) Something else happening? Share what you think about the news. Check out “The Life Lesson from Plaxico Burress“

4. Invite guest posts
Have top experts in your industry? Contact them and invite them to write guest posts for you. Check out “Developing an Integrated Content Marketing Strategy That Works” by Joe Pulizzi, co-author of Get Content, Get Customers.

5. Re-energize old posts
A very cool feature of WordPress.com is the ability to copy posts. Find a really good post you wrote in 2009 and copy it. Then edit it and freshen it up. Bingo. Brand new post! Check out “How to Gain Customer Trust – Insights by Guy Kawasaki” – which I published a couple of times.

6. Use Slideshare.
Take a presentation you did, upload it to Slideshare and record an audio track for it. Then match your audio up in Slideshare. (Contact me if you don’t know how to do this.) Slideshare has a very cool embed feature, so the viewer can see your slideshare right in the blog post. Check out “The Power of B2B Lead Nurturing.” for a great example of embedding a presentation in a blog article.

We also suggest you use your keywords (Like lead generation company) and use them in your blog posts. (Google loves frequently updated blogs.) so it really helps with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). And Hubspot found an active blog gives a company 57% more leads.

We hope you found these tips helpful. What do you think? We love your comments and sharing. Good luck with your blog.

Sources:

Laugh and Learn with Find New Customers

The Power of B2B Lead Nurturing

How to Gain Customer Trust – Insights by Guy Kawasaki

Developing an Integrated Content Marketing Strategy That Works

The Life Lesson from Plaxico Burress

5 Lessons a B2B Marketer Can Learn from Breaking Bad

Facebook: So My Business Has a Page – Now When do I Post?

850 million people are on Facebook.  That’s 1.7 Billion eyes that have the potential to see and engage with your posts.

Wow.

But, exactly, when can you guarantee that the most possible eyes will see everything that you are posting?  How do I know if “now” is good enough?

It seems that there is a science to this, and social scientist Dan Zarella from Hubspot, has found that there are specific days and times that are best for posting to Facebook, and specific days that are best for having your posts shared.

As we review the best and worst times to share, something to keep in mind (depending where you are located) is that almost 50% of the population is located on the East Coast of the United States, and therefore, the timing of your posts should take into account this group.

The Best and Worst Days

So, what are the best days to post to Facebook?  The research has shown that the best day to have content shared is Saturday.  That’s right, it seems that this is the day when most people have the time to catch up with their Facebook friends, and share everything that they may have missed throughout the week.

So, when shouldn’t we post?  The days of the week with the lowest shares seem to be Monday and Thursday.  Keep this in mind when looking at your schedule of postings throughout the week.

The Best and Worst Times

Now that we know what the best day of the week to post is, what about timing?  Should I post all day?  Are there specific times when my posts are more likely to be seen?

Glad you asked.  The best time of the day, by far, seems to be noon, with 7pm a close second.  What this means is that your content is more likely to be seen and shared if you post it at 12pm and at 7pm (corresponding to lunch hours and after dinner hours).

The worst?  Any time before 8am and between 1pm and 4pm.  These times are the most likely to have your posts ignored by your fans and followers.

How Many Posts Per Day?

Now that we know the best days and times, just how many posts should we be sharing on a daily basis?  According to the research, the optimum number of posts per day is .5.  What exactly does this mean?  Very clearly, it means don’t overwhelm your followers.  Don’t post 5 times per day, and certainly don’t post numerous items in succession.  We all hate spam, and the more you post, the more likely it will be that your followers will consider your posts to be unnecessary and therefore spam.  You should also re-think your policy of posting daily, as the research indicates this may also overwhelm your fans.

In the end, engaging at any time is worthwhile, and these are only statistics.  Maybe you notice your fans are very active early in the morning.  Or you are trying to reach teachers, with no access to Facebook at noon.  Make sure to take your audience into consideration when determining the best schedule for you and your business.

What’s working for you?  When have you found is best to post?

Sources:

Hubspot

WebProNews

Social Times

Black Box Social Media