Reputation Management for Restaurants
Reputation Management Package
What are people saying about your restaurant? Review management is more important than ever in the restaurant industry. In today’s world, reviews can make or break a restaurant. Every restaurant will receive some positive and some negative reviews. An occasional negative review are okay. Diners are smart. They know the difference between legitimate reviews and fraudulent reviews.
In some cases, fraudulent and malicious reviews can be immensely damaging and need to be dealt with in an appropriate manner. The best method to combat negative reviews and to build brand loyalty is by initiating positive press through proactive reputation management.
Thinkfree Media’s Integrated Reputation Management package offers a comprehensive solution to protecting your Brand’s reputation.
1. Review Monitoring & Aggregation: Thinkfree Media Monitors & Aggregates Online Reviews from sites like B4-U-Eat.com, Yelp.com, Citysearch, UrbanSpoon, TripAdvisor, Yahoo Local, Google Reviews, Zagat and 29-95.com. You receive detailed reporting on what diners are saying about your restaurant in one easy to read report. In some cases, review management requires responding to reviews when appropriate and removing negative reviews when possible. Thinkfree Media specializes in proactive review management.
2. Claim Place Pages: Google Places, Yelp, Citysearch and a variety of online publications collect information about your restaurant and provide this information to potential diners. Thinkfree Media’s Reputation Management Package includes claiming and monitoring of your place pages. This ensures making sure your hours of operation, contact information, images, private party listings, catering information and any other information relevant to your restaurant is correct and up-to-date.
3. Monthly Press Releases: Thinkfree Media creates and distributes press releases to relevant local restaurant publications such as: B4-U-Eat.com, Houston Chronicle, 29-95.com, The Houston Press Blog, Alison Cook, Cleverley Radio, MyTable and more. Press Releases are a proactive way to ensure you get your message out and a great way to promote happenings at your restaurant.
4. Website Blogs: Thinkfree Media creates blog content as an outlet for articles relating to your restaurant. This includes food related articles, blog posts, special events, menu descriptions, press releases and special announcements regarding your restaurant. Become the expert in your industry. Thinkfree Website Blogs can be used as your sole website, or the blog can be added to your current website. This not only creates positive content for diners, but increases your visibility in the search engines.
5. Social Media Branding: Social Media is a proven method for increasing brand loyalty and getting your message out. If you have yet to set-up of Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare and other social media outlets, Thinkfree can help you start your initial pages. If you already have your social media pages set-up, ThinkFree Media’s comprehensive approach to social media promotion includes integrating your positive reviews, press releases, articles and blog posts into your social media promotion.
6. Email Marketing: Thinkfree Media’s reputation management package integrates your positive reviews, press releases, blog posts, articles, press releases and social media promotion into your email marketing for a multi-method approach to brand awareness and customer loyalty. Email marketing is a great way to increase the frequency of customer visits, build brand loyalty and communicate on a personal level with your customers. An integrated approach is always the best approach.
7. Digital Video Marketing: Video commercials are a great way to attract new customers to your restaurant. Consumers say video gives them the feeling they know you personally before ever visiting your restaurant. Video Marketing is also a great way to improve your presence in the search engines. The Thinkfree Media Reputation Management Package includes complete video production and marketing. Thinkfree Media provides full-service video production and marketing. From concept to creation, Thinkfree Media walks you through the creation process every step of the way. Once your video is shot, it is keyword tagged and uploaded to Google Video, YouTube & Vimeo; and then integrated into your website blog, press releases, social media and email marketing.
A pro-active integrated approach to Reputation Management is by far the best way to attract new customers, increase brand awareness, communicate with your current customers and protect your reputation.
Contact Thinkfree Media today for a consultation about our Restaurant Reputation Management Package.
NOW HIRING: Independent Sales Rep – Houston, TX (Media & Advertising Sales)
We are hiring independent sales reps to sell online marketing to local businesses. Our packages consist of social media promotion, web video, online public relations, content creation (blogs) and reputation management.
Earning potential is huge. This is a COMMISSION ONLY position. If you are a RockStar who is not afraid of a commission position, this is the job for you.
The packages we sell range from $1500/mo to $5000/mo (or more). If you’re a fearless sales leader, we pay 30% commission upfront (weekly), plus monthly residuals and a robust bonus structure which allows you to realistically earn over six figures your first year.
If you are not afraid to make calls and/or hit the streets, you can expect to make a minimum of 2 sales per week (the average rep sells 3-5 deals per week)… you do the math.
We are looking for people with creative prospecting skills and professional presentation skills. You must be a strong closer with keen natural sales instinct.
If you have a book of business with contacts even better. And if you have experience in advertising or media sales, restaurant marketing, retail sales, medical sales, spa & beauty sales or legal sales, your resume will be given special consideration. However, not having experience in these industries does not disqualify you; so regardless of your experience, if you feel this is the right job for you please send us your resume.
This is a real-deal sales opportunity. You will work from home, set your own hours, and be your own boss. You must be organized, self-disciplined and be able to work efficiently and independently. We provide all presentation materials, collateral and business cards. There is no investment on your part, but you will need your own phone, car and computer.
Please reply to this ad with the subject line FEARLESS SALES LEADER. Copy & Paste, or attach your resume with a cover letter explaining why you would be a good fit for this position, and send to: hr@thinkfreemedia.com. And have an Awesome Day!
NOW HIRING: Social Media Ninja / Online Marketing Manager – Houston, TX
SOCIAL MEDIA NINJA / ONLINE MARKETING MANAGER (REQUIREMENTS):
- Social Media: Experience setting-up, growing and maintaining a full-fledge social media campaign. This includes, but is not limited to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. You know all the tricks, understand the use of hashtags, etc. You have working knowledge of FBML.
- Website Design: Some experience with WordPress, HTML , CSS, and PHP.
- Email Marketing: Proficient with HTML, graphic design skills, and can use Photoshop to build flyers. etc.
- Public Relations: Solid writing skills and familiarity with the process of press release creation and distribution.
- Online Reputation Management: Understand aspects of online reputation management. Can use Excel spreadsheets to aggregate reviews.
- Organizational Skills: Has excellent organizational skill. For example, can organize a video shoot by communicating with the client and crew.
- Customer Support: Has excellent written and verbal communication skills. Will be working with clients (via phone and email) on a day to day basis to keep up with what is going on at the client’s place of business: promotions, daily offers, customer support, etc.
- Interest in Selling: Has an interest in sales. Will have sales assistant duties and will sometimes cold call to set qualified appointments for sales reps.
- Ability to Learn Quickly: Must be be a very quick learner, be able to work in a fast-paced environment and be able to adapt quickly to changes.
Please reply to this ad with the subject line SOCIAL MEDIA/ONLINE MARKETING NINJA. Copy & Paste, or attach your resume into the email with a cover letter explaining why you would be a good fit for this position, and send to hr@thinkfreemedia.com. And have an Awesome Day!
Integrated Social Media & Digital PR
PR professionals use social media every single day to get the word out about clients, to communicate with customers and to respond to questions or problems. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social sites have quickly become important tools in a PR professional’s overall toolkit.
As one PR professional, Jeremy Pepper, told us,
“There are so many uses — conversational marketing, reaching influencers — that PR is able to participate in conversations and answer questions, be a support system for clients and companies, as well as empowering customers and power users to be a de facto resource for your company, a champion for your products.”
We’re going to take a look at how PR professionals are using social media to achieve real results when dealing with business-to-business relationships, when representing companies that already have a well-known brand, and in politics. We’ll also look into some of the tools of the trade that PR pros are using to measure the success of their endeavors.
The Role of Social Media in Business-to-Business PR
Pepper considers social media an important part of the public relations toolkit. When I asked him what social media has to offer PR professionals, he said, “Social media is a great tool for public relations people, especially if you align it to both PR goals and figure out what the ROI is for the client or the company.”
As we’ve pointed out when discussing measuring social media ROI, having a goal in mind or a main focus can be very important when using social media for any reason.
Pepper offered some insight into how he uses social media with Palisade Systems, a business-to-business data loss prevention company. For Palisade, the main goal is to increase the company’s name recognition. Because data loss prevention deals with sensitive data and often regulatory compliance (for things like HIPPA/HITECH, FERPA and others), having strong name recognition is important, as a known name can often be equated with trust.
Pepper explained how he goes about reaching his client’s core audience, in this case small and medium-sized enterprises.
“At Palisade, we’ve done a three-pronged approach: traditional PR, traditional analyst relations and social media. We have a Palisade Blog where we write and talk about Data Loss Prevention and various issues for corporations, we are on Twitter, shooting out information, retweeting interesting articles in the space, and participating in conversations [@PalisadeDLP], and, we reach out to security bloggers.”
While I expected Twitter to have limited use in a B2B PR strategy, it turns out it can actually be pretty powerful. By following security experts and industry analysts, Palisade can take part in the conversations happening in the space. Pepper can also track keywords on Twitter and then communicate with CIOs and IT people who are asking questions about DLP and he can then send them case studies or reach out to start a new kind of relationship.
As Pepper said, “It lets the people know that there is another solution besides the large corporations, and lets us have conversations with the analysts beyond the calls.”
Blogging, for instance, is one way the company can share stories beyond just what goes into a press release.
“One recent example is that EPISD (El Paso Independent School District) is a legacy customer of Palisade Systems, and recently signed up for the DLP solution. I interviewed the IT staff for the press release, and got great anecdotes that weren’t really appropriate for the press release. But I was able to tell them in the blog post, and expand on why they continue to use Palisade — because of our support, and our product.”
Social Media Drives Authenticity
Political figures have really embraced social media — the White House has an official presence on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, plus its own blog-powered website, for example — and more and more local and national representatives from all over the world are taking to the web to connect with their constituents.
Claire McCaskill, the junior U.S. Senator from Missouri, is one politician that has embraced social media in a big way. On Twitter, @clairecmc has nearly 37,000 followers — making her the second-most popular person in Congress, according to Tweetcongress.org. The Senator also has a YouTube channel and a Tumblr blog that she uses to share information with her constituents and to respond to questions.
Anamarie Rebori, a spokesperson for Senator McCaskill, told us that the senator actively uses social media. “While it definitely has changed the way she gets the word out, McCaskill has said that if anything, she is glad she has the opportunity to bring a more personal touch to her communications and get outside the Washington bubble,” Rebori said.
Especially for politicians, authenticity is an important part of PR. According to Rebori, McCaskill has been able to utilize social media to communicate authentically. “People seem to respond best to an authentic touch over Twitter, and that’s something that Senator McCaskill has been able to convey in her use of social media,” Rebori said. “It’s really her typing each of those tweets, and people can tell.”
Senator McCaskill makes a point of reading every tweet that is addressed her way — and she also makes a point to respond to others on Twitter, either via @replies or direct messages. However, as the Senator explained in her Tumblr blog, she doesn’t follow anyone.
That’s not because of lack of engagement, it’s because it’s the best way the senator can allocate her resources. Furthermore, the senator has developed a hashtag for Missourians to use so that she can connect with as many of them as possible. If you’re a Missouri resident and you use #MO in a tweet, chances are it will get the senator’s attention.
There are huge possibilities from a PR perspective for politicians who use social media, as Senator McCaskill’s success shows.
Building Brand Loyalty
Pepper also works with computer bag and accessory provider Targus. Because the company is already well-known in its space, the goals for public relations are different than with other brands. “Working with a very well-liked brand, it’s both hard and easy to get conversations going,” Pepper said, who explained that responding to negative feedback is rarely an issue because Targus gets very little.
Instead, the approach for Pepper has been figuring out ways to develop brand loyalty and turn customers into fans. One method that has yielded results for Targus is utilizing its Twitter account for giveaways and promotions and monitoring Twitter conversations to target bag-buying consumers.
In one situation, Pepper followed a conversation between a user who had a bag from a rival company. Pepper tweeted the user a coupon code for 25% off, which ended up being more than what the company that made his old bag had offered him and resulted in the user writing about his experience. That’s the type of thing that can create long-time customers and also get users observing or reading about the situation to consider Targus for their next product.
Using social media has provided Pepper with a simple way to build brand loyalty without having to invest significant time and resources.
Website Design for Small Business
Your website is an integral part of any business, small or large. In fact, for a small business, the role of the website is even more important, only because a small business may have less marketing resources than a larger business.
Often, when I start to work with a new client, my relationship starts with the business owner. The advantage of this is that I get to know the heart and soul of the business and I also have a clearer picture of what the business goals are.
In the process of growing the business, many times it’s important for business owners to bring in a new marketing professional to assist them with marketing efforts such branding, brochures, newsletters and of course the website.
This is a very important move for the business owner and also is a good sign that the business is growing.
It’s important for the business owner to understand is that the transition from being involved with the site to not been involved should be done slowly. I understand that the main reason for having a new marketing person in charge is to help the business owner free up time. But as you may know by now, it’s not the same to tell someone “I need you to be responsible for preparing the next brochure” as saying to the same person, “I need you to be in charge of the website”, because as we know, your website internet strategy is not as simple as a brochure.
Let me give you a visual example. Let’s say that you are in the restaurant business and own and operate a small restaurant; you have had it for a few years, and the restaurant is doing great. One day, you hear that the retail space next door to yours becomes available; it’s a great opportunity for you to expand the restaurant. Then, you choose to hire an architect to help you redesign the new space. You could decide that the redesigning task is too big and not in your area of expertise, and you let the architect make all the decisions. Most probably this is not a good idea, because as you know, the architect does not have the same restaurant experience as you do, as the business owner.
What I am trying to say is that it’s important that you do not separate yourself entirely from the website, in the same way that you can not separate yourself from your business.
You, as a small business owner need to be involved and understand your internet strategy because nobody else understands your business better than you do.
-NetKlik Blog
Online Video Production & Marketing
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
ThinkFree Media Internet Marketing has Partnered with Zoom Moving Pictures Video Production
Houston, TX – April 4, 2010 – ThinkFree Media has partnered with Zoom Moving Pictures, a full service multimedia and video production company based in Houston, Texas. Zoom is comprised of a small team of television and commercial writers, directors, producers and multimedia specialists, as well as an experienced staff of videographers, editors, music composers and audio engineers.
According to Adrienne Menden of ThinkFree Media, this partnership opens a wide-range of opportunity for both partners. In the past, ThinkFree Media has concentrated its efforts primarily on internet marketing, but with the Zoom Moving Pictures partnership ThinkFree Media is now a full-service digital marketing agency.
“We can now offer our clients more options for online marketing. Digital Internet Video is the new media favorite of the online world. Local businesses use these videos to market their businesses online via their websites, YouTube, Facebook, Google Video and other Social Media avenues.” says Adrienne Menden.
“A study by spotthisnow.com states that video marketing is an effective marketing strategy and improves website SEO. More than half of all traffic is being driven through video marketing. More and more people searching directly on video sharing sites and search engines now offer video in their search results. Online marketing is a competitive market and many local businesses are beginning to make use of internet video as an effective local marketing tool.” says Menden.
With Zoom’s experienced production team, ThinkFree can now shoot the digital internet videos they market for their clients online. They now offer a full online marketing public relations/video distribution package. Adrienne Menden looks forward to a long and mutually successful relationship with Zoom Moving Pictures.
For more information contact ThinkFree Media at www.thinkfreemedia.com or 832.209.1371.
###
Reputation Management… Reviews, Reviews, Reviews!
How to Take Advantage of Online Review and Answer Sites
A look at using customer forums and review sites such as Yelp to generate sales, tips on responding to negative feedback, plus how and why to make it simple for customers to review you.
By Josh Spiro | Jan 25, 2010
As a business owner, you’re used to calling all the shots, so it can be infuriating when the Internet seems like a vast, uncontrollable forum for customers to heap criticism on your company. Getting a rave review on an obscure website but being unsure of how to highlight it as an example of your devoted customer base and quality services can be just as frustrating.
Many businesses get caught up in the frenzy over social media such as Twitter and Facebook, while neglecting review and answer sites. Comprehensive surveillance of review sites could save you the cost of consultants and focus groups, and allow you to interact directly with customers to manage and monitor your company’s reputation. Responding to criticism, within limits, and posting answers to online queries in your industry can bring in new and repeat customers if done properly.
Some key sites in this field to familiarize yourself with are Yelp, Yahoo! Answers, and Mahalo. Yelp has millions of reviews of local businesses around the United States. It’s free to set up an account, and it allows you to answer questions about your business and see how many users are scoping out your business’ page. Setting up a detailed profile with useful information such as images and a link to your website will give your company more visibility and clout, while you can offer special discounts or promotions for customers that give you a review.
The upside of Yahoo! Answers, is that it is immensely popular and largely dominates the Q & A market. However, the quality of the answers is typically low because absolutely anyone can ask or answer a question. On the bright side, that just gives your well-thought-out response more of a chance to shine.
Mahalo is a human-powered search engine with a growing Q & A section. That section allows users to post a question and offer a monetary prize or tip for the best answer. A $50 or $100 tip can draw dozens of respondents who are incentivized to think hard about your question and your brand. It’s like an instant, public focus group with marketing built in,” says Jason Calacanis, Mahalo’s CEO.
Sometimes a niche Q & A site targeted to your industry is more effective. For example, if your company does business consulting, a site such as Bizmore, which is an advice community for small and mid-sized businesses, can really help you zero in on your target demographic. Examples of smaller players in the Q & A field that are still useful to know about or look into are peppered throughout this article.
How to Take Advantage of Online Review and Answer Sites: Answer Questions to Find Customers
Surfing message boards and Q & A sites to answer the questions of current and future customers can be a serious boon to a small business. It’s a relatively easy way to raise brand awareness, build your SEO strength, and even generate sales leads. But you can’t just rampage through the world of online queries dispensing unwanted advice like a magic eightball gone haywire. You need a primer on the etiquette and strategy of online Q & A.
1. Be flexible. When Best Price Nutrition discovered that the questions they answered on Yahoo! Answers had a higher click-through rate and resulted in more new customers than their company blog, they retooled their online strategy to focus more on reaching out to customers through Yahoo! Answers.
2. Be genuine. It always helps to link to your website at the end of a post, though some forums forbid it and you should examine any online community’s rules before engaging. Also, keep the tone personal rather than promotional. Use your name and title at the company, and for forums that require a user name, make sure you are consistent across all the platforms you post on. At all costs eschew corporate speak.
3. Don’t lie or mislead. This rule sounds simple, but enough companies flub it that it bears repeating. Some obvious examples to avoid emulating include John Mackey, Whole Foods‘ CEO, who was caught cheerleading Whole Foods and bashing its competitors on online stock market forums. In a similar vein, Lifestyle Lift, a national plastic surgery company, was forced to pay the highest price yet for this sort of practice when New York State fined the company $300,000 for “deceptive commercial practices” after its employees posted positive reviews of the company’s services without revealing their, ahem, conflict of interest.
4. Put quality before quantity. Each answer you post reaches not just the original poster but anyone with similar interests and access to a search engine. This means you don’t need to kill yourself responding to every forum user whose question has some bearing on your business.
5. Don’t feed the trolls. An inevitability of anonymous message boards is angry or spiteful people with a lot of time on their hands. If you become engaged in a conversation with someone who is clearly irrational or has some sort of ax to grind, the best strategy is to ignore them.
Dig Deeper: How to Get Profitable Sales Leads Online
How to Take Advantage of Online Review and Answer Sites: Know What People are Saying
“The first phase of social media was listening to the conversation. The second phase was joining the conversation. The third phase will be hosting the conversation on your site,” says Calacanis. But first things first, here are some of the best ways to track public opinion about your company.
1. Keep a finger on the pulse. There a multitude of free sites that allow you to track mentions of your company or brand on both traditional and social media. Some free and popular methods include setting up Google or Yahoo! Alerts, as well as tracking Twitter hashtags, which serve to organize trends and topics, and mentions of your user name. Using Guy Kawasaki‘s Alltop, a directory of popular blogs and articles on a wide range of subjects, can help you keep tabs on the movers and shakers in your industry and potentially develop relationships with them. In a separate category from reputation monitoring sites and services, Google Analytics is a great free tool that lets you monitor your website traffic which, among other things, can help you evaluate the success of your social media efforts. Finally, it’s probably a good idea to keep an eye on the competition as well to see how you could improve and avoid pitfalls.
2. Get insight into customer satisfaction. Services such as RatePoint, a suite of widgets that business owners can subscribe to, including customer reviews, surveys, and newsletters can be downloaded to any commercial website. The service helped Will Aubuchon who runs Hardwarestore.com customize his inventory to better meet customer demand and boost revenue by 5 percent last year.
Dig Deeper: Safeguard Your Brand Reputation Online
How to Take Advantage of Online Review and Answer Sites: Responding to Negative Reviews
If your Yelp page is one of the first things to come up on a Google search, scathing reviews can put a real dent in your pocketbook. At the same time, sometimes you have to toe the line. Here’s how to approach a giant digital thumbs down.
1. Don’t get defensive. It’s the natural response but no matter how justified you feel, your initial response to a miffed customer should be apologetic that they had a negative experience and convey proactive steps to address the problem.
2. Be quick on your feet. Customers will often go back to update a negative review if the issue gets resolved, so a swift response can turn a negative into a positive.
3. Be discreet. Reach out to negative reviewers directly and privately, you want to learn more about their grievance and acknowledge them in a controlled setting. Perhaps later, if the situation is applicable to a larger segment of your customers you can post a general apology or update on your website or blog.
4. A few bad reviews won’t kill you. Obviously it would be great if all your customers composed sonnets extolling your company’s greatness and performed them on YouTube, but even if you have hardcore fans, there will always be haters. This is one reason you should encourage customers to review you. The more feedback you have the smaller the voice of the malcontent reviewers will be.
Dig Deeper: How Businesses Can Respond to Criticism on Yelp
How to Take Advantage of Online Review and Answer Sites: Removing False Information
Responding to constructive criticism is one thing, you can take it into account to improve customer satisfaction and your business in general, but what if there’s false, defamatory information about your company floating around in the ether? One site, the RipOff Report, serves as a forum for consumers to complain about different businesses. However, the founder and editor of the site, Ed Magedson, refuses to take down false complaints, though he will investigate them for a fee. This business model has made RipOff Report the subject of many lawsuits, but the site appears to have survived most of the legal challenges unscathed. If you find yourself in this situation, here’s how to take matters into your own hands after politely requesting a retraction, of course.
The main thing is to beef up your SEO. If people refuse to take down defamatory content about your company, your best option is “trying to push that domain onto the second page of Google so that it’s not coming up in the top ten results,” says Brad Fallon, an SEO expert and the CEO of Stompernet, a network for entrepreneurs to compare best practices for online businesses. After all, acing the algorithms to manage your online reputation is a lot less expensive than dragging the situation before the courts.
Fallon also recommends that companies not only keep a main company website but also several other ancillary blogs or domains for key products or events, which will also help to control what shows up first in a Google search. If that doesn’t work, you can engage in SEO sabotage: purchasing links to the offending website that appear on a site that’s already in the search engine’s doghouse for violations such as keyword stuffing, machine-generated pages, or copyright violation. Such behavior is malicious but has yet to be deemed illegal. A SEO consultant would probably only do this if the content that you’re burying is defamatory to your company and not just a customer with a bone to pick.
Dig Deeper: Can you take legal action against a former employee who bad-mouthed the company?
How to Take Advantage of Online Review and Answer Sites: Make It Easy for Customers to Review You
Asking your customers to review you point blank is a bad idea when unsolicited; it is especially unappealing to the under-30 demographic, although it works better after an in-depth, positive customer service interaction. Feedback rates can be as low as 10-15 percent even for successful e-commerce sellers so you should make it as easy as possible for your customers to review you. It’s also a good idea to let your employees know that positive customer feedback can boost revenues, as well as their compensation.
1. Use an aggregating service. Services such as BackType and uberVU allow you to pull comments about your company from different social media onto your site in real-time. So, for example, you can set up a section of your website where your customers can go to see feedback, both good and bad, culled from their fellow customers.
2. Create your own feedback community. Creating and hosting your own community of customers discussing your company or product can be beneficial but it can also be costly. “Running a successful community takes about $10,000-$25,000 a month in resources if you want to do it right,” says Calacanis, which he acknowledges isn’t within the budgets of many small businesses. Still there are advantages for companies that can shell out that kind of cash. “The best thing a brand can do is create a branded community because relying on what’s out there has too much risk for my liking,” says Rob Frankel, an independent branding consultant.
Both Frankel and Calacanis’s companies provide these types of services to their customers but Calacanis notes that, price aside, it’s not the answer for every brand; your customers already have to feel a certain way about you for it to work. He says, “Only about 10 percent of brands are ready to ‘host the conversation’ on their site. Most folks have a hard time even listening and talking to their customers online. Can you imagine if AT&T had a questions and answers community? They would spend all day answering [questions like], “Why does your mobile network make my iPhone suck so much?”
Dig Deeper: Business Owners Warm Up to Online Reviews
How to Take Advantage of Online Review and Answer Sites: Resources
To keep tabs on mentions of your company and competitors:
• Services like BackType and uberVU help you track social media mentions of your brand or company as well as pulling those comments onto your site.
• Alltop is a media aggregator that collects headlines and blog posts on popular topics. You can use it to keep tabs on the movers and shakers in your industry and potentially develop relationships with them.
• Google Analytics lets you monitor your website traffic which, among other things, can help you evaluate the success of your social media efforts and where potential leads are finding you.
To post answers and reach out to customers:
• Yahoo! Answers is well optimized but the quality of the answers provided there tends not to be as rich as on other sites. This gives your cogent response more of a chance to stand out however.
• Mahalo Answers allows you to hold mini focus groups at a great value by paying users for the best answer. Just remember lowball offers might get you poorly thought out answers.
• To get feedback from your customers, you can use services such as RatePoint, which has the capacity to provide business owners with customer reviews, surveys, and newsletters.
• Yelp is becoming an increasingly important resource for people looking for the skinny on local businesses such as restaurants, barbers, and even doctors that they might want to use. Making sure you have a robust profile with plenty of information is an important first step in taking command of your Web presence.
• Niche question and answer sites on a subject such as business, can help you zero in on your target audience. Bizmore and FiLife.com are two good examples of strong niche communities.
To get creative:
• If you want to get creative you can try forming partnerships with existing Q & A services or decision engines to suggest your company as a solution to people searching for a related topic. For example, ChaCha provides answers via text, Aardvark helps people get answers by reaching out to their extended social networks, and Hunch helps people make decisions by asking them questions about their personal preferences.
Strategic Internet Marketing
Marketing has been around for ages. Internet marketing is fairly new. Internet marketing strategy, while different in terms of the venue in which it takes place, is not all that unique compared to other marketing strategies. The principles that work with internet marketing strategy are actually the same ones that marketing experts have always used. And there are many schools of thought regarding the basics of a marketing strategy. The basic four P’s approach is the most popular. That is Product, Price, Promotion, and Positioning are what you should consider when formulating your internet marketing strategy. However, there are a couple of factors that are somewhat unique to internet marketing. And focusing on them can make the different between a successful strategy and a weak one.
First, in internet marketing strategy, is the personalization of the message. It is important to not only identify who your potential customers are, but also to know what they are looking for. Your marketing message needs to be developed and customized to deal with your identified target customer base. This means that you should talk directly to your target market rather than as a general customer. If you are marketing head ache pills, make sure your marketing message addresses people with head aches and not just people with some form of pain. Know your market and address them directly.
Second in internet marketing strategy is privacy. With anything online, people are of course worried about their information being safe. You should make sure that your potential customer base has good reason to trust you with their information. Having information about your customers makes it easy to cater to their needs. Without security you will not get that opportunity. You need to make sure you have proper security to guard customer information. You need to make sure that current and future customers are aware of what steps you are taking to protect their information and privacy. Draft a Privacy Policy for your business and make it easily accessible to your clients. Don’t assume that your clients will know about your privacy policy – tell them. Make sure you put their minds at ease and they will in turn be willing to trust their information in your hands.
As with any business, customer service is important to your internet marketing strategy. This is because people need to know they are being cared for, especially in the cold world of the internet. Adding a customer service link and giving your customer an easy way to contact real representatives will aid your internet marketing strategy a great deal. People like to deal with other people. Make sure you give your customers that option.
Internet marketing strategy is a necessity for not only online businesses, but also any business that wants to reach that group of people who use the internet. In order to get your strategy in place and running smoothly it is important that you understand that while many aspects of internet marketing are the same, there are also aspects of it that differ from real world marketing. Addressing these aspects is as important as paying attention to the basics.
-Khemal Dole
3 Steps for Strategic Internet Marketing
Strategic internet marketing requires you to spend time everyday managing your business and the steps you are taking to run it on the internet. Regardless whether you do mostly email marketing, have a money making website, or both, profitable internet marketing can be achieved if you work at it.
The quickest way to get your business online is with pay per click advertising. A pay per click ad campaign should be a part of your strategy from day one. Learning how to bid on keywords that relate to the content of your site and then managing those bids to give you the highest possible return is not as easy as it may sound. You are definitely going to want to spend some time learning before you start spending. The sooner you master the basics off this internet marketing strategy, the quicker you can drive traffic to your website or autoresponder if you use one. Of course you can always hire an internet marketing expert to help you or even run this for you.
Every successful strategy for marketing on the internet has to include search engine optimization. Getting your web pages to rank highly with the various search engines can bring you years and years of free traffic. The goal should be to rank highly for your primary Keywords with Google, Yahoo and MSN. These 3 search engines drive over 90% of all search engine traffic. Take the time to learn what they want on your pages. Everything from your title, page description, headline tags, alt tags, bolding and underlining keywords, keyword density and much more should be looked at. There are companies sprouting up all over the place that claim they are SEO experts. Ask to see one of their personal websites. If they can not do it right for themselves, do not pay them to do it right for you.
Article marketing should be included in your internet strategy for marketing your business. Articles allow you, or the person you hire to write them for you, to establish credibility with your audience. You are allowed to include a bio box at the end of every article that includes your website address. This is a great strategy for driving free traffic to your website. Once you get them there the rest is up to you!
They key to putting together a successful internet marketing strategy is to master on thing and then add another. Putting all of your eggs in one marketing basket is a bad idea, but so is jumping all over the place without ever mastering one of the strategies. Jack of all trades and master of none is o.k. only after you have become a master of one to start with. Strategic internet marketing will only be achieved by working hard at it everyday.
- Alan Richardson
