Do

• Have your business cards with you at all times. Have a pocket for your cards, and a pocket for the cards you collect. If you need business card ideas that stand out, take a look at these creative cards featured on Mashable.
• Have a great handshake. Some handshakes are too firm, some are too soft, and some are just right.
• Have your elevator business pitch ready. Be clear and concise.
• Treat everyone with respect. You never know where your next customer or referral will come from.
• Keep in touch. So you met some great people/businesses that you’d like to keep in touch with, now what? The next step is reach out via social media, or email to stay connected. Here are some guidelines:
  • Follow businesses you liked on their social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest) business pages.
  • Connect on LinkedIn with folks you met and make sure to include where you met them and maybe even something you talked about. Also, make sure you have a updated picture on your profile. It’s best to be able to see/remember the person before you accept their invite to connect on LinkedIn:

Who are you Suzanne? Where did I meet you? A little context here would make all the difference.

• Follow up with people when you say you’re going to and with the information you promised. Nothing’s worse then an “I’ll call you” and then never hearing from them again (sound familiar?) Check out this great follow up from Linda at the Women’s Network. She follows up with helpful information and in a very timely manner.

Don’t

• Try to “hard sell” someone on your product during the first meeting. You’re just getting to know each other so tell them about your company but don’t try to get them to sign up or buy just yet.
• Talk about yourself too much. Just like dating, you need to find out about the other person by asking questions and listening to their answers. We’ve all met that person that is all, “Me, me, me” and no one sticks around to talk to them for long.
• Drink too much. Like Patti Stanger says on Millionaire Matchmaker,“There’s a two drink maximum.” After two drinks you might start to commit some of the other don’ts listed here.
• Use the wrong name when you email or connect with the person on LinkedIn. We have to admit, we’ve done this before when we were in a rush, but we try to never repeat that mistake. Here’s a LinkedIn invite we just received as a perfect example:
  
  Jeff did a great job saying where we met but who’s Stacy? My name is Jenny! Maybe the two drink rule kicking in?

• Don’t try to add your new contact on their Facebook personal profile page unless they invite you to. It’s their personal page and you don’t want to overstep your business/personal relationship.

Are there any dos and don’ts you think we’ve missed? Have any networking advice of your own? Share with us!

© 2013, VR Marketing Blog. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

The post Networking Dos and Don’ts from an Event Pro appeared first on VR Marketing Blog.

Now we’re not talking about scaring the bejesus out of your customers, but rather, using your content and features to create a surprise through mediums like email or social media marketing. All our attention on analytics and metrics, writes Redick, “certainly make[s] our profession more efficient. But they also can make brands less exciting and surprising. With all of this information at our disposal, we risk robbing brands of opportunities for serendipity — the delightful surprises that happen when we least expect them, attracting the attention of consumers.”

In Redick’s opinion, surprise is the most powerful marketing tool because:

Surprise is addicting
According to Redick, scientists at Emory and Baylor used MRIs to measure changes in human brain activity, and the study “suggests that people are designed to crave the unexpected.” Redick gives Birchbox, the successful subscription beauty product mystery box as an example, proving that business models can be built around this insight. One of our personal favorite mystery addictions in the retail world is ModCloth’s stylish surprise grab bags. For $15, you could snag anything from a skirt, to a dress or a cute coat worth up to $300. The surprise grab bags are only available at random and sell out immediately in nanoseconds!

Surprise induces change in behavior
“Surprise introduces us to new stimuli, which we must then reconcile with shifts in our beliefs and behavior,” writes Redick. Training the mind to think in terms of desired consumer behavior can help unlock innovative strategies. “When developing an advertising campagin, we are often too focused on the question, ‘what do we need to say?’ Instead, we should focus on the question of ‘What expectations do our customers and prospects hold, and how can we turn those on in their head?’” says Redick.

Surprise spikes emotions
Surprise isn’t an emotion, but rather an emotion enhancer. Redick explains, “The interesting thing about surprise is that it appears to amplify whatever you’re feeling. When we’re surprised and angry, we’re outraged. Remember what happened when Netflix raised subscription prices without warning? Combine happiness with surprise, and you hit the upper register of the feeling-good scale.” Redick gives Zappos as an excellent example of a company successfully combining happiness with surprise. The online shoe retailer goes to great lengths to deliver shoes before they’re promised, hence customers are not only surprised by the early arrival of their purchase, but delighted.

Surprise creates passionate relationships
Similar to a relationship with a loved one, the element of surprise with your customers can spice things up. Redick explains that “one experiment conducted among middle-aged married couples found that engaging in less common, but more ‘exciting’ activities like skiing or dancing led to greater marriage satisfaction that pursuing activities that are more common and ‘pleasant,’ like seeing a movie or cooking together.” Just as married couples reacted favorably to unexpected or exciting events, a client, customer or business partner will also be drawn to an unexpected or surprising pitch – provided it’s in line with the business relationship.

The technical and analytic aspects of social media and email marketing are extraordinarily important, but if you’re looking for new ways to stand out, or to reignite a spark with some of your long-term business relationships, don’t be afraid to try something new, daring, or even surprising. When used effectively, surprise truly can be the most effective marketing tool.

What is an example of a time that a marketing effort has surprised you, and how do you remember reacting?

© 2013, VR Marketing Blog. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

The post The Power of Surprise as a Marketing Tool appeared first on VR Marketing Blog.

Content Curation – Curating is something most of us do everyday when we share things like, retweet something interesting on Twitter, Pin a neat picture, include a helpful quote in a blog post, etc. Content curation, creating useful content and getting it seen and shared, is the engine of successful content marketing.

The key difference of content curation vs. content scraping has everything to do with proper source credit and attribution. According to Steve Rosenbaum’s article on Mashable, 5 Tips for Great Content Curation, you need to “Take the time to give attribution, links back, and credit. The sharing economy works because we’re each sharing our audiences, and providing the value of our endorsements. If you pick up someone’s work and put it on your blog, or mention a fact without crediting the source, you’re not building shared credibility. You’re just abusing someone else’s effort.”

Do you see in the above paragraph how we sourced the information? We told you who wrote it (Steve Rosenbaum), where (Mashable), the original source (in the article titled 5 Tips for Great Content Curation), and we linked to the original source, as well as shared an exact quote which we placed in quotation marks. That’s how you properly and accurately provide source credit and attribution. Get more information on how to provide source credit with these tips from the Washington Post.

A quick note about content syndication: Content syndication is when you give permission to another site to publish your blog or work via an RSS feed or otherwise. Proper source credit and attribution is always provided by the syndicating site. There is a great primer on the benefits to content syndication here from SearchEngineWatch.com. 

Content Scraping – Technopedia defines content scraping as “an illegal way of stealing original content from a legitimate website and posting the stolen content to another site without the knowledge or permission of the content’s owner. Content scrapers often attempt to pass off stolen content as their own, and fail to provide attribution to the content’s owners.”

We’ve experienced content scraping ourselves and have found many of our blog posts published word-for-word without source credit or attribution and often times, carrying another author’s name. Plagiarism isn’t cool.

Aside from stealing content, scrapers also hinder your website or blog’s search engine optimization efforts because search engines view this as duplicate information on multiple sites – Not a good thing. Search engines try to punish scrapers by comparing post timestamps, but if they can’t determine who the original poster is, everyone involved may get punished. A good way to avoid this is by ensuring you have your Google authorship set up. Our own Chipper Nicodemus states, “Setting up and verifying your content lets Google know you’re the content’s legit owner. If your blog’s content is getting used without your permission, having your authorship set up will ensure your post will rank higher than the person, or blog that’s using it.” He goes on to advise, “Be sure to include some great internal links in every blog post, so if your post gets shared via your permission or otherwise you will get a backlink.”

To further avoid unauthorized use of our own work, we added copyright information to the bottom of every blog post we publish. This can be accomplished with a simple WordPress plugin.

If you’ve got a content scraper on your hands, you can find determine the website owner via a WHOIS search. Send a quick letter to the owner with a cc to the hosting company to take care of matters. Plagiarism Today offers pre-formatted letters here.  They’ve also got a great post on the 5 Simple Rules for Reusing Online Content and we think they sum it up nicely by saying, “Reusing content, when done right and with permission, can be a great symbiotic relationship between a creator who gets extra exposure and a webmaster that gets new content. Done poorly, it becomes more parasitic and not only can harm the original creator, but discourages others from making their work available for reuse.”

How do you curate content and avoid content scraping? Share your thoughts in the comments.

© 2013, VR Marketing Blog. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

The post Are You a Content Thief and Don’t Know It? appeared first on VR Marketing Blog.

1. Don’t lash out: Sometimes it’s hard to deal with constructive and/or blatantly harsh criticism from others, especially on such an open public space or forum like Facebook. However, as we learned from the recent and epic social media meltdown that Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro had on Facebook, it’s an excellent example of what no to do. Owners, Amy & Samy Bouzaglo lashed out on Facebook in response to some not-so-nice criticism after airing on Gordon Ramsay’s, Kitchen Nigtmares. Instead of say, swearing, ranting for hours, “yelling” in all caps, calling customers “stupid,” and then trying to cover it all up, responding quickly and calmly to a customer’s complaint, and trying to resolve it as soon as possible is simply the best thing you can do.

2. Don’t buy followers or fans: It may be tempting to make social media a numbers game. The more followers or “Likes” you have, the cooler, more trusted, desirable brand you must be, right? However, the point of social media isn’t to acquire a mass following, but to build relationships with legitimate potential and current customers. It’s all about quality over quantity – You may have 1 million followers, but if half of them don’t exist or don’t actually give a hoot about your brand, you may as well have none. Focus on increasing the quality of your content rather than increasing your numbers, and you’ll build a solid strategy and fan base.

3. Don’t create fakes comments: Who doesn’t want engagement and comments on posts, as well as a few good reviews on various sites? The problem is, they just can’t come from you – It boils down to dishonesty, and customers can easily see through it. Instead, include calls-to-actions in your social posts like, “Like this post if you agree,” and ask questions that’ll entice customers to respond. Need more reviews on your Yelp page? Encourage customers, and/or even give rewards or discounts to those who do write reviews, but honest ones!

4. Don’t be “Sir Spam-a-Lot”:  Commenting on other social media or blog posts purely for the purpose of getting your own brand out there screams “spammer.” If you think your content is relevant, contact the owner of the post and propose a real linking or collaboration strategy. If you offer value with your content, you may develop a meaningful relationship – Win-win. Check out our post, How to Connect with Online Influencers – Dos & Don’ts for more advice on how to approach these relationships.

5. Don’t plagiarize: Simple and true, “stealing content” aka plagiarism, isn’t cool. Content marketing is all the rage these days, however, creating your own quality content is of the utmost importance. It’s A-okay to use other posts, websites, articles and studies as a source as reference in your own content, but they absolutely must be cited and attributed – no ifs, ands or buts about it. If you’re sharing third party content on social media, or in blog post, (even if you’re paraphrasing), the source must be cited, including a link. Not sure how to go about this correctly? Check out our post, Journalism 101 – What Bloggers Need to Know for all the details.

6. Don’t embellish: Whether it’s a promotion, a contest, the specifics of what your service or product can offer, or a reaction to a mistake, exaggerating or embellishing can be incredibly obvious to a large audience. In our Amy’s Baking Company example above, the Bouzaglos later tried to cover up their major social media meltdown by posting, “Obviously our Facebook, YELP, Twitter and Website have been hacked. We are working with the local authorities as well as the FBI computer crimes unit to ensure this does not happen again. We did not post those horrible things. Thank You Amy &Samy[.]” Lying to backpedal instead of apologizing and owning up to a mistake will only backfire. Honesty is the best policy.

Have a craving for more social media “what-not-to-dos”? Check out our post, Scary Social Media Faux Pas – Don’t Be That Guy. Have any other tips or scary faux pas that you’ve witnessed on social media lately? Spill it!

© 2013, VR Marketing Blog. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

The post Top 6 Social Media No-Nos to Avoid appeared first on VR Marketing Blog.

Here’s a breakdown of three I’m really into right now:

1. LaunchRock

Launchrock is probably the quickest, easiest way to set up a website intended to start building an audience. The site builder is simple and intuitive–you describe your idea, upload a nice image and point your domain name to the site. Launchrock then provides a simple form asking potential customers to sign up to be notified of the pending launch of your product. In less than an hour, you can have a great site that helps you build a list of potential customers and prospects.

We’ve been working on a major change at VerticalResponse, and we’ve been using LaunchRock to collect e-mail addresses for folks that want to get the scoop, or be a part of a beta. We’re loving it.

Cost: Free with no limits to how many e-mail addresses you can collect.

2. FiveSecondTest

We regularly use tools like Optimizely to test our landing pages and homepage of our site, but when I discovered FiveSecondTest, I was intrigued. The site is a crowd sourced usability test for your home page, landing page, e-mail marketing, or your app. Here’s how it works:

• You upload a screenshot or mockup of your page, app, etc.
• You pre-load a few questions for testers to answer.
• Then the fun begins. Testers have five seconds to view your image and must then answer the questions you have set.
• FiveSecondTest collects all of the responses for you, extracts the frequent keywords and then presents the data with easy-to-understand graphs.

You can also participate by taking a minute to serve as a tester and get free testing points for doing it. It’s pretty eye-opening to see how sites are presented and just how much there is to digest in five short seconds. It can make you think about your own site through a different filter.

Cost: Free and paid options.

3. Conduit

Conduit enables you to create a mobile website and mobile apps in a snap. With so much web browsing being done on mobile devices, it’s a no brainer to get on the mobile site bus now, and thanks to the Conduit folks, you can do it by simply copying an auto-generated code into your regular site. Anyone who visits your site on a mobile device will be redirected to your mobile site–just like that. Conduit’s mobile app maker is equally as friendly with a nice selection of designs and templates, you can customize your app to complement your company look and feel and you’re good to go. Where was this when we built our mobile app?

Cost: Free and paid options.

Have any other cool website tools to add to my list? Share away in the comments, I’m always game to try something new!

This article by VerticalResponse CEO and founder Janine Popick originally appeared on Inc.com.

© 2013, VR Marketing Blog. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

The post Make Your Website Rock: 3 Cool Tools appeared first on VR Marketing Blog.

image courtesy of ClickMeeting.com

Consider webinar content – The first thing you need to focus on when planning a webinar is your content, as it’s your most important aspect and something you should consider thoughtfully to ensure it’s appealing. Although this may seem challenging, you’d be surprised by what people are interested in learning. Think about what your attendees should know, or want to know about your business, products or service. 
Here are some starting points to consider for your content:

• What do people need to know in order to get started with your product or service?
• What can you do to help people get past any obstacles they may have?
• 
What advice or tips can you offer?
• What are some frequently asked questions?
• Provide a demo of your services or programs.
• Create awareness for your business or organization.

If you’ve never hosted a webinar, pick a topic you’re comfortable with, as it’ll help you feel confident about your presentation. Also, consider having live questions and answers at the end of your webinar. Your attendees will appreciate the chance to ask questions and have them answered right away. Questions add value to any topic you pick, plus, they give great insight into how people interact with your products or services. And, you can pick and choose the questions that will be most helpful to your attendees.

Create a presentation  – For most webinars, you’ll need to create an interesting and compelling presentation. We use PowerPoint at VerticalResponse to create ours, but there are a variety of options including, Google Docs, Prezi and Sliderocket. Most tools have an array of styles for the slides.

You obviously want your webinar presentation to be visually appealing, but try not to overwhelm viewers with too many images. A good rule of thumb is to use one image per slide with text, two-three if you’re showing something specific or making a point. If your presentation offers images for slide backgrounds, use them sparingly.

Also, as tempting as it is may be to add a lot of details to a slide, don’t. Add a couple of lines of text or use bullets to make your points. Speak about a topic or slide as much as you need to, but adding more text to a slide makes it harder for viewers to concentrate – They get caught up in reading everything you’ve added to the slides and miss what you’re actually saying. Let the bullet points show your main speaking points and then you can elaborate as you need to.

After your presentation is complete, you’ll want to do a few practice runs so you know how it flows, what your viewers will see, and what points you’ll need to say. It also helps to get someone else to proofread for typos and any errors.

Get the party started – Before you’re ready to get the webinar party started, keep in mind how it’ll be perceived by your attendees.  All the prep work you’ve done will be for nothing if they can’t hear or view what’s going on:

• Log in early, (at least 15 minutes prior), to set up, trouble shoot any problems, and to let your attendees know you’re there.
• Find a quiet place to conduct your webinar. You don’t have to set up a sound booth, but find somewhere that has little outside noise, or people who could interrupt or distract from your presentation.
• Whether you use a microphone or phone, remember that every sound in the room will be picked up and become part of the webinar. So don’t rustle papers or do other loud things.
•  Ask questions or do a survey during your webinar. Many webinar programs have this feature built in so that your viewers can interact and give feedback live, and you can share the results on the screen automatically.
• Have something to drink on hand; a glass of water, coffee, tea or even wine, whatever you prefer. Webinars are a talky business and you’ll want something to sip on to keep you hydrated.

Follow-up – Once you reach the end of your webinar, it’s not all over. Send out a follow-up email to close the circle. Some webinar hosting services will automatically send follow-up emails, which is handy, but you’ll want to edit the message to give it your own voice and include any important info including a link to the recorded version of the webinar, if there is one. You may want to create separate emails for attendees and non-attendees, offer different content and links and check your stats to see if you get different engagement.

Consider sending out a few emails to encourage sales from your customers, or help convert the leads you generated by hosting the webinar. If your webinar service doesn’t send out a follow up email, you can easily create one yourself (and VerticalResponse can certainly help you with that). Simply download a list of all attendees and registrants from the hosting service, then upload to your email service provider and send out a follow up.

Now that we’ve unlocked these 4 tips, your webinar will be a success! Knowing your topic and practicing your webinar beforehand will give you the confidence you need if you’re feeling a little nervous. And, if that doesn’t help, remember it’s just you in the room talking – You can’t see your audience, and they can’t see you, just pretend they aren’t even there and relax. For more webinar tips, check out our post, Be the Webinar Host with the Most.

Do you use webinars for your business? What tips would you add to this list?

© 2013, VR Marketing Blog. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

The post Unlock Pro Tips to Creating a Successful Webinar appeared first on VR Marketing Blog.

Choosing the Right Keywords

When selecting keyword or phrases, adding any word or phrase that’s relevant to your business may sound like a good idea. Wouldn’t you want to receive the most traffic possible to your site? In theory, yes, but none of us have an infinite amount of marketing dollars to spend. Keyword selection is a critical process that requires you to look at the keywords that will ultimately result in sales, or conversions. By focusing on keywords that are too general, or broad can result in increased PPC costs.

For example, using keywords that are too general may target potential customers who aren’t ready to buy yet. Say you’re a small car dealership bidding on a keyword like, “used car information.” Although the phrase is relevant, it may actually target people who’re still in the “research or information” stage, while a customer searching for “used Hondas for sale,” is closer to a buying stage than just searching for information. When you focus on keywords that target users at the right stage, you should have a greater return on investment on your PPC campaigns.

Understanding and Using Match Types

Not fully understanding or using targeted match types, can cause you to waste money by inadvertently targeting irrelevant search queries, and may cause you to pay more than you need to for certain keywords. In short, each match type gives you more granularity into targeting.

Broad Match – Broach match is called “broad” for a reason. Broad match allows your ad to show for searches on similar phrases and variations. This includes misspellings, synonyms, and other relevant variations. For example, if you were to bid on “running shoes” on a broad match, you’ll also show up for results for “running sneakers,” which is generally a good thing. The problem lies in that you would also show up for “running shoe cleaner.” If you don’t sell shoe cleaner, this would be an example of a phrase that could be wasting your money. If you were to bid on “green sneakers” and “green shoes” separately on an exact match instead, you could actually end up paying a less expensive CPC (cost-per-click) for each of those keywords, as well as limit the amount of irrelevant traffic.

Phrase Match – Phrase match will show your ads only for searches that include the exact keyword phrase you’ve selected, as well as some close variations. If we use the same example, “running shoes” but in a phrase match, your ad would also show for “cheap running shoes” because that phrase is contained within the search. If the search was for “running orthopedic shoes” your ad wouldn’t show.

Exact Match – Exact match allows you to show only for searches that match exactly the keyword or phrase you’re bidding on. Using the same example, your ad would show only when “running shoes” is the search. This limits the amount of traffic, but is also the most targeted and is generally less expensive than bidding on broad and phrase matches.

Negative keywords

Negative keywords are a great way to reduce the amount of unqualified traffic. By automatically ruling out words like “jobs, contacts, etc.” it’ll cut down on people who aren’t looking to make a purchase. Ruling out words that may be used in conjunction with your keyword, but aren’t relevant to your offering are also good keywords to add as negative keywords. Combined with proper match types and keyword choices; this can really help maximize your PPC spend.

Geo/Day/Device Targeting

Google Adwords allows you to target and segment your target audience in multiple ways including, Geographical, Day, and Device Targeting. Geographical targeting allows you to target specific locations, regions, cities, states, countries, etc. Device targeting allows you focus more on specific devices, which may be worth more to your business. Lastly, Day Parting allows you to adjust keyword bids between different days or hours of the days in order to spend your marketing dollars when you are most profitable. For a more in- depth look at these targeting options, check out our previous blog post, 5 Google Adwords Tips for a Small Budget. Also, with Google Adwords newest changes around Enhanced Campaigns, maximizing these different targeting options will be even easier.

Making Good Use of Google Reporting

Google Adwords offers a variety of insightful reports to help you determine where problems may lie in your account and provide you with valuable information into where efficiencies can be made. For example, a Search Terms Report provides you with a list of all the search queries that resulted in your ad being shown. This report is helpful determining irrelevant keywords as well as opportunities for new keywords. After you determine which keywords or phrases you do and don’t want triggering your ads, you can add them as new or negative keywords.

Another essential report is the Campaign Report. This report can be sliced and diced in different ways and can provide great insight into where you should be focusing your PPC efforts. If you break it down by day or hour of the day, it can help you to determine when most of your conversions are occurring so that you can shift your budget to those most profitable times. If you look at it on a geographical basis, you can see where most of your conversions are coming from and exclude certain areas that aren’t your target audience or simply don’t perform well. These are only a few of the many reports Google Adwords offers.

By maximizing these five areas, you can make the most of your PPC mula. Pay-Per-Click PC world also offers more insight into other PPC mistakes you might be making.

How will you use these tips to make the most of your marketing bucks? Share away?

© 2013, VR Marketing Blog. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

The post Don’t Waste Your Dough! 5 Secrets to Maximizing Google AdWords appeared first on VR Marketing Blog.

When you first started your business, you may not have spelled out your target market in much detail, but spending some time to hone in on it now could reap some major benefits for your business. Knowing your target market allows you to spend your marketing time and resources more effectively. You might also discover potential new customers you hadn’t considered before.

So, how do you figure out who your target market is? Here are a few things to think about:

Getting to Know You

You not only need a solid understanding of your customers and their needs and desires, but you also need to know yourself pretty well too. What products or services do you offer? How do they benefit your customers? Do they benefit different customers in different ways?

Let’s say you’re a tax accountant who offers tax preparation services. The benefit seems pretty obvious – Customers don’t have to do taxes themselves (phew!). But think a little deeper. Are your services more suited to high-income people with complex tax situations who want to avoid an audit, busy people who could do their own taxes but are willing to pay to have you take care of it, or someone who needs tax planning help? Once you know who your target is, you laser focus your marketing efforts to the folks who are most likely to buy your product or service.

Here are some helpful tools and resources that’ll help you determine who your target market is:

• U.S. Census Bureau has a plethora of information by state, city, age, business, geographic and much more. They’ve also got data from the 2012 Economic Census, which is the U.S. Government’s official five-year measure of American business and the economy.

• Google Analytics provides a depth of knowledge about who’s visiting your website, how they got there (by keyword, referring site, etc), how much time they spend and so much more.

• Facebook Insights - If you’ve got a Facebook Page for your business and it has over 30 Likes, you can access Facebook Insights. Insights provides data about who’s interacting with your Facebook Page including total page Likes, or number of fans, daily active users, new Likes/Unlikes, Like sources, demographics, page views and unique page views, tab views, external referrers, media consumption. Mashable offers a great Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Insights here.

• Surveys – Asking your customers a few simple questions via a survey can uncover some really valuable information that’ll help you hone in on who your customers are and their overall satisfaction. You can also learn about other services or products customers want.

Think Outside the Box

Defining your target market isn’t all about whittling it down to very specific groups; you may actually find your market is larger than you thought (That’s opportunity knocking!)

Ask yourself these questions:

• Does my product have other uses?
  Maybe you sell organic shampoo. Can it also be used as body wash or laundry detergent? Is it particularly good for babies or those with sensitive skin?
• Can I create new products or services my current customers would buy?
  If I run a yoga studio, would my customers also be interested in other types of exercise classes?
• Are there services I can offer along with my product?
  Customers of a plant nursery may need landscape design help. What other services are they getting elsewhere that you can provide?

Find a Common Thread

Is there something many of your current customers have in common? By determining a few characteristics many of them share, you can target similar people.

This is an especially useful strategy for non-profits seeking donations. Who are your current donors? Do they have similar jobs, hobbies or interests? An organization raising money for the environment may find it has a number of donors who are teachers that participate in outdoor sports or lawyers who drive hybrid vehicles. If you can identify some common traits, you can target similar people.

Remember the Obvious

This may go without saying, but we’re going say it anyway… How did you get your current customers? Did they find you? How? Yellow page ad? Word of mouth? Website? Did you find them through an event or trade show? Do you convert more people with a special offer or free sample? Figure out what works for you, and keep refining your tactics.

So there you have it, a few things to think about to expand your target market. How do you identify your target market?

© 2013, VR Marketing Blog. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

The post Do You Know Your Target Market? How to Find Out… appeared first on VR Marketing Blog.

Heidi Cohen of Social Media Examiner defines a call-to-action as, “a way for you to entice your social media audience to focus their attention on the next action you want them to take.” Cohen recently wrote about ways to improve your social media calls-to-action; her tips include:

• Clearly determine what action you want readers to take – CTAs aren’t just about closing sales, other common actions include signing up for email newsletters, downloading a whitepaper, watching a product demo or scheduling a consultation.

• Hook ‘em – Answer the reader’s question “what’s in it for me?”

• Don’t promote, persuade – Social media marketing is about context and engagement, not merely posting direct sale opportunities. Cohen gave Target’s Tumblr page as an excellent example as they, “show customers the fashion back story and how to style their clothes. There’s no ‘Buy, Buy, Buy’ in their content. They use social media sharing and notes to build customer excitement and engagement pre-purchase.”

Target’s Tumblr

• Motivate with urgency – Utilize limited time offers or promotional opportunities to give your audience the extra incentive to act quickly.

• Tailor landing pages – Cohen writes that recent research has “found that using more landing pages yielded better results. This makes sense because it translates to more targeted offers.”

• Test what works best – As you monitor a CTA’s effectiveness, try changing individual aspects to find the best result. This can include changing prompt placement, text size, color or the message. Best results are found by changing only one aspect at a time, so you can tell what works.

• Measure all results – Don’t just guess what works, measure what works. Look at click through rates, conversions, completions and abandonments.

Social media marketing can be a really fun, creative way to express your company’s culture and set innovate marketing goals. It’s important to always keep an eye on your calls-to-action to get the best return on your investment. What techniques do you use to for engaging CTAs? Share away!

© 2013, VR Marketing Blog. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

The post Butter Up Your Social Media Calls-to-Action appeared first on VR Marketing Blog.

Email Testing for Accuracy

Once you’ve added images and links to your draft email, you need to send out a test email. Send one to yourself as well as a few coworkers or eagle eyed friends to proofread and click your links, as it can be easy to miss something when you’ve been looking at it for a while. When you get the test, do a quick check of the following:

• Is the subject line attention-grabbing and typo free?
• Do the images render correctly?
• Is there alternative text for images? (Most email clients block images by default, however the alt text will appear)
• Do your links go to the right places?
• Is your font easy to read and consistent throughout the email?
• Are there any typos in the content?
• Is there a clear call-to-action (or calls-to-action)?

Testing Email Clients

Because emails consist of HTML code, each email client has its own rules that determine how your email will look in a recipient’s inbox. Outlook, Apple Mail, Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail are all commonly used email clients that you may want to test. We recommend sending a test email to a few of these email clients to ensure your bases are covered. If you want to test multiple email clients at once, you can try Email on Acid, which is a tool that allows you to preview your email to see how it looks.

When testing your email, be sure to preview the way your email appears without images, as many email clients render or display an email without images by default (Gmail is a good example of this.) By using alternative text (alt text) in your images, you’ll ensure the message isn’t lost even without the images. If your email uses large images from Photoshop or a similar tool, keep in mind that the text inside these images will not appear when your image doesn’t.

Email Testing on Mobile Devices

A recent study by Litmus indicates that the email clients with the largest market share are Apple iPhone (23%), Outlook (17%), and Apple iPad (11%). Yep, mobile is hot. According to another study by by Knotice, 41% of emails sent in the second half of 2012 were viewed on mobile devices. (This was an increase of 14% from the year before.).  So whenever you test your email, it’s a good idea to also view it on mobile devices if have them available.

Here are a few things to consider when testing on a mobile device:

• Is the font large enough to read?
• Do the images work on the small screen? Very large images or too many can cause issues on mobile devices.
• Are the links large enough and spaced out enough for someone to click on? (It’s very helpful to use buttons to make it easier for mobile users to click.)
• Does the email load properly? Sometimes if your email is too large, it’ll require the mobile user to download the remaining portion.

Keep in mind, any extra time required by the recipient can be a deterrent to act on your call-to-action.

Testing Browsers

You may or may not be aware that emails can render differently across the different web browsers. It’s a good idea to view your email in the most popular web browsers – Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. Each browser has its own set of rules that govern the appearance of your email, so you may not be able to get identical results, but you can at least be sure the email looks pretty similar in all three of these browsers. BrowserStack is a great tool for testing how your email looks in different browsers quickly.

Some things to check for:

• Is the background color the same in all browsers?
• Do the images show up properly?
• Is the font color and size consistent?
• Are the column widths the same or similar?
• Is the overall appearance clean and legible?

As you can see, there are many facets to testing your email before sending! One important thing is not to get too bogged down by wanting the email to look exactly the same in every email client or on every browser. Most importantly, focus on the message being easy-to-read with clear calls-to-action.

What’s the first thing you test in your email?

© 2013, VR Marketing Blog. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

The post Email Testing 1,2,3 – How to Get an A+ appeared first on VR Marketing Blog.