Do you Tweet?

(Did you just laugh and start to click your mouse to get out of here?)

Before you leave, spend a minute with me to consider something.

The automobile was invented in 1885 by Karl Friedrich Benz. (I’m not an encyclopaedia, I just Googled for that fact)

The first automobile drove down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1896.

Elapsed time for the automobile just to start being seen by regular folks was 11 years.

In eleven years the automobile had only just begun.

Social Media, or more specifically, Business Social Media, is about 10 years old.

This blog post is saying that Business Social Media  just getting started. It is in its infancy.

I suppose many folks chuckled and guffawed that day the first automobile chugged down Pennsylvania Avenue. I can see some scratching their heads, saying,  “what the heck is that silly contraption?”

Would you believe me if I told you that I have clients who pay me 40 dollars a month just to manage their Twitter accounts?

And Twitter is easy. light-hearted  and fun. Other Business Social Media properties are more serious, complex and substantial.

But don’t laugh too hard at Twitter.

Because in five years my clients who had the foresight to invest in Business Social Media, might be flying by you in their Ferrari’s.

And you will be at the side of the road creeping along in your horse and buggy..

Ok, maybe that’s self-evident.

But as I work harder and harder to help my clients get more customers, I get smarter. I learn. My marketing weapon arsenal grows. Success (and failures) show my strengths and highlight my weaknesses. With all the whizz-bang Internet know-how, sometimes it’s easy to get side-tracked.

You tend to forget the fundamentals of utilizing the Internet to get more customers.

The real heart, guts and power of Internet marketing is not video or squeeze pages or split-testing or copy or SEO or Google maps or fill-in-the-blank.

These tools -as important as they are- are useless if you use them to build something that does not fulfill a specific pressing need the customer has.

Specific. Pressing. Need. In other words if the customer needs a house and you build a houseboat: no sale!

House or houseboat. They are similar, but then again they not similar.

You nearly understood your customer’s needs but you didn’t listen well enough.

How precisely you understand a customer’s exact needs is by the amount of painstaking analysis of the keywords the customer puts into their browser when they are seeking a particular
good or service.

I know what you are thinking: ‘everybody knows that’.

Question: when developing a project or advertising campaign for a client do you spend at least 40% of your time doing keyword research?

That’s the amount of time Paul Myers of  Talkbiz
suggests.

He gave me that advice three years ago and I heard him, but I didn’t listen. It took a painful and costly mistake to learn it.

The school of experience is a hard school but a fool will learn in no other.

What I’m getting at is that growing a good, responsive email customer list takes time and creativity. I have had a few clients complain that the growth process was too slow. This might have been my fault: my enthusiasm probably caused me to gloss over the time aspect of the process. So I’m saying it now just to be clear: it takes time. But so what. Even if you add five customers a week in a year you will have quite a substantial list. You will have added a lucrative asset to your business for very low cost.

Recently a customer called him with a job to replace an engine on a 2000 Toyota Corolla. The man loves Toyotas (who doesn’t?) and knows them like the back of his hand. The customer brought the Toyota in and was told the job would cost $1200 up front and $1100 upon completion. CASH! The customer agreed.  The business owner completed the job and the customer was thrilled with the results.

Out of curiosity, the business owner asked the customer: how did you hear about my business anyway?  The customer replied: “I found you on Google maps. All your contact information and even a picture of your business”

He just scatched his head and was perplexed. Later when he told me this story I explained that Google actually hires people to go around taking pictures of businesses and lists them in their map section.

I just think that is very cool. If you want to check out your business in Google Maps go to  http://maps.google.com

Tracking the trends in online video consumption, MeFeedia reports that in 2009:

• More people are consuming online video content via their mobile phones, with the top three phone platforms being (in order) the iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry.
• Apple’s iPhone was the fastest growing mobile device for watching video and had six times greater video consumption than any other mobile platform – largely driven by the built-in YouTube support of the iPhone.
• 1024×768 was most popular screen resolution (preferred by 40 percent of online video viewers), followed by 1280×800 (20 percent) and 1280×1024 (10 percent).
• Sony’s Playstation 3 was the most popular device for TV viewing, followed by the Nintendo Wii.
• The average watch time for short-form online video was 1:15 minutes and the average for long-form online video was 8:50 minutes.
• People are watching more short-form than long-form video

“I would never buy-or let a client buy- a business with out a good list of customers’  names AND  contact information.

Most business owners mistakenly place high value on the physicality of business: storefront, office, factory, equipment, inventory. But all that is easily replaceable and duplicatable. It’s just stuff.

All the real value is in the customers.

Email marketing enables any business owner to create a customer list for very low cost.

1. Rule 1 is don’t hire a Limo Company based on price alone. The lowest cost provider is not necessarily the best. The cheap limo service could send you an old limo with rust. It happened to me. Of course, depending on your needs an unattractive Limo might not be a problem.

2. But a cheap limo service has other pitfalls. One horror story that actually happened to me: the driver was, well let us say “embarrassing”. I’ll spare you the ugly details but you can use your imagination. (Both visual and olfactory)

3. The following company has my highest recommendation. Check out their little music video commercial:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKpBpXqzaeU

Research by Experian Marketing Services indicates that 80 percent of email campaigns containing online coupons derive 50 percent higher open rates, as well as higher click-through rates, higher transaction-to-click rates and higher transaction rates than non-coupon email campaigns.

Experian’s key findings are that:

Two-thirds of American households use coupons, with the vast majority of coupons (87 percent) used to save money and 30 percent used to try a new product or service.
Seventy percent of coupon-using households obtain their coupons from newspapers. However, the Internet is a growing coupon source. Over the last three years, the number of households that get their coupons online has increased by 46 percent.
Nearly half of all American households use coupons to buy food/grocery products, making them the most common items purchased with coupons, followed by cleaning products and beauty/grooming products.
More households are now using coupons at restaurants/fast food chains. Compared to 2006, there are now 9 percent more households redeeming coupons at restaurants.
Click rates trended higher for coupon emails, with average lifts of 17 percent for coupons redeemable online and 24 percent for coupons redeemable in-store.
Eighty percent of online coupon mailings garnered higher transaction-to-click rates and transaction rates than the non-coupon campaigns. Of this group, 78 percent also generated higher revenue per email.

That list will become an incredible asset in a very short time.

http://increasemywebsitetraffic.com/website_traffic/tips/email-marketing-that-pays/