Business marketing advice, tips and guides to help you boost your promotions
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is the art of making your website communicate well with search engines. It plays a crucial role in gaining the right sort of visitors to your website, so it should be the first thing to think about when you start to build one.
New Year has come and gone and all around the World talk inevitably turns to resolutions. Are you looking towards a slimmer you? Giving up smoking? Perhaps you have decided to dedicate more time to others.
It’s also a good time to sit back and review your networking. Is your current activity working for you? Are you in the right networks, getting the referrals you want for your business?
Take the time to check you are on the right track. Even the top networkers do it. I spoke to some of the UK’s leading networking experts and heads of networks to find out what they expect to happen in networking in 2009 and their own plans for the New Year.
ecademy – the business-orientated social networking site, that we have covered many times within the pages of Business Matters, gave a stark warning to its members of the possible pitfalls of using social networking as they left supposedly private support emails sent through the site publicly viewable as the result of a programming error earlier this week.
It is an all-too-common scenario when I’m working with sales teams or business owners – that when I look at their sales pipeline (you do have one of those, don’t you?) far too often I see they are very busy, but they’re chasing the wrong deals! In this article, we’re going to examine that particular challenge and how we overcome it.
Andy Lopata, networking specialist, talks about the rise of social networking for business gain.
Whenever I’m speaking to sales managers and directors, I find that many are frustrated that seemingly no matter what they say to their sales team, the team is still getting stumped over price objections from their clients! In this article we’re going to look at why your sales team still get price objections and how this gets in their way (and yours) of sales success.
Often, salespeople put their success (or lack of it) down to sheer ‘luck’… but just how much of their achievements should be put down to luck alone? How can certain salespeople excel during a sales slump whilst others fall the wayside? Are some salespeople just born lucky?
I remember a quote from the golfer, Gary Player, when accused of being "lucky" he said, "The harder I practice, the luckier I get".
Marketing accountability should be a priority, but in reality there is a lot of talk on the matter, and less action. Given access to large corporate budgets, marketing staff have promised returns on investment and increased market share. However, the evolution of the dot.com era has contributed to the fact that marketing staff can no longer get away with promising big results without quantifiably measuring them.
Increasingly, businesses have been looking to ‘word of mouth’ marketing to find clients with the growth of networking groups providing opportunities for companies to spread the word and get referrals.
Times move on and with the growth of online social networking opening people’s eyes to the power of the internet, companies are looking to see how the increasing number of ‘social’ business networks can be used for marketing and sales purposes.
Almost nine out of 10 UK web users watched video online in December, according to comScore, whose data revealed the dominance of YouTube.
In the UK, 28.7 million web users, or 87% of the online population, watched video in December, accessing 3.1m videos.
177 years ago this month, the south-east of England was aflame as farm workers rioted. Under the leadership of the mysterious ‘Captain Swing’, they launched an orgy of burning and destruction across the countryside.
If you, like me, are the kind of person who hides away when the video cameras come out, you might well ask, why on earth would you want video content on your company website?
The reason why I’m recommending that you think differently today is because I believe that 1. video content is the future for business websites and that 2. business websites with video content attract more customers and drive higher sales.
A new business networking organisation has just launched specialising in creating local online communities. Word Of Mouse, created by one of the former founders of the BRE Network is hoping to capitalise on the current boom in online social networking with sites like Facebook, Ecademy and Linked In.
The environment is changing. The IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 4th assessment report was released in February warning that climate change poses the single biggest threat to businesses and societies.
The effects of global climate change and the exhaustion of natural resources are becoming increasingly evident, with consequences for human well-being. In the world of marketing these global changes are shifting consumers’ expectations of brands and companies. Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the power held in their purchase choices. Businesses have a new obligation not just to make money but also to ‘do good’ and embed a sense of global citizenship, social responsibility and environmental responsibility in their brand.
Having a company website is the norm for any serious business these days, no matter what its size is, but it makes very little sense to spend good money on a website unless you can make it easy for people to find, use, and come away with a clear vision and understanding of what you’re about and the desire to return.
The best websites offer visitors something different but equally useful or entertaining each time they visit, compelling them to come back for more. Without exception, these are websites that are in constant evolution; they are the sites that are tended to daily and regularly updated with new information.
