Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

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Online Marketing Trends To Grow Your Business

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
Online Marketing Trends

Online Marketing

As we come to the end of the first half of 2010, businesses in Nigeria need to look to meet the needs of an increasingly mobile and social customer. It’s our opinion that the businesses in Nigeria that will be the most successful are those who adapt their strategies to align with shifting online trends.

The adoption of new online marketing techniques will also be paramount to keeping a competitive edge and ensuring return on investment (ROI). To help point you in the right direction, we have identified five trends likely to impact online marketing ROI in 2010 and beyond.

  • Email Marketing: Contrary to speculations, email is not dead. With its low cost and targeted reach, it is the perfect base from which to build other online marketing initiatives. Email is the most measurable marketing channel, with proven and reliable high rates of return on investments (RoI). And when combined with other online marketing channels it becomes even more powerful and effective.
  • Online Marketing Analytics: If your business has an online presence (not just a website!), improved integration with online marketing analytics tools will empower your business to extract detailed data reporting, offering new opportunities for you to optimize your marketing campaigns, show results and demonstrate market share. Currently there are several companies investing huge resources to ensure that they improve internet connectivity in Nigeria. Therefore, your business most be prepared to explore new opportunities.
  • Blending Email Marketing With Social Networking: Social networking is now being described as the number one activity on the Web and it plays an integral role in a large majority of customer buying decisions. When you blend email marketing with social networking, it becomes more effective and can extend reach, enhance engagement, grow customer opt-in lists and build customers’ trust and loyalty to your brand.
  • Mobile Marketing: The presence of different telecom operators in Nigeria has opened up different avenues for mobile marketing. Mobile marketing reaches your targeted audiences and drives the urgency of your message in real-time while extending marketing reach, building customer retention and loyalty, and building a strong, interested and opted-in customer base. Mobile’s low execution cost means maximized campaign effectiveness.
  • Integrated, Online Marketing: In 2010 your business now has the opportunity and the ability to easily create integrated online marketing programs – joining email, search, social, mobile and other online marketing channels – and most importantly measure and optimize those programs with integrated metrics.

There’s no question that email marketing is the anchor for online marketing, and significant opportunities exist for your business to take advantage of synergies between online marketing channels.

Mauco Internet Consultants is ready to assist you with your online marketing efforts. We have made it our goal to help your empower your business online to make you more successful. Contact Mauco now if you need help in developing an effective online marketing strategy.

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Posted in Articles, Business Success, Internet Business Solutions, Online Business, management, social media | No Comments »

5 Rules of Social Media Engagement

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
5 Rules of Social Media Engagement

5 Rules of Social Media Engagement

Are you one of those that have jumped on the social media bandwagon to promote your business? Were told social media would boost your sales, improve customer relations, manage your online reputation, and reduce every bit of overhead you have? So what happened? Why have you not started reaping those benefits, despite the fact that your having a presence of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc?

What most business owners fail to understand is that social media is not just a two-way communication between you and your customers, social media is rather a multi medium that lets your customers have conversations with other (potential) customers.

Your potential customers/target market would prefer to learn more about your brand from your existing customers rather than being bombarded with print/electronic adverts. Social media is the perfect platform for this to take place. Since social media a relationship driven multi-medium, there are 5 basic rules of social media engagement that you need to respect. The rules are:

  1. Relationships come before sales: Building relationships takes time because building trust takes time. Social media can only impact your sales after you have built a strong relationship with your customers to become more loyal customers. These loyal customers will in turn refer their friends and family to you.
  2. You go to the community, the community doesn’t come to you: Don’t wait for your customers to come to you, rather you should go to them. If you target market are using Facebook, join the Facebook community, if they are on Twitter or LinkedIn, join those communities too.
  3. Communities are grown, not built: Once you’ve got your social presence set up, go out there and talk to people. Get to know them, and start building relationships. Don’t just expect that since you’ve setup and account on Facebook or Twitter, then they should automatically start flocking to you. You still have to put in some effort. You have to make some noise. You have to go out of your way to make friends. You have to show your friends and your community what you can offer them.
  4. Don’t try to replace the community: Don’t try to re-invent the wheel by building your own customized online communities from scratch to compete with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. Instead concentrate on adding value to these communities through your brand’s presence on these social networks.
  5. Content is king: On the worldwide web, content is king! Content can be anything from articles, blog posts, pictures, tutorials, videos, reviews etc. So if regular content production isn’t part of your social media strategy, it’s going to fail. But it has to be relevant to your customers’ demographic and it has to be regular. Because once you stop producing content, you stop participating, and relationships whither.

 So if social media isn’t working for you, ask yourself if you are breaking any of these rules.

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Posted in Articles, Branding, Business Success, Online Business, social media | No Comments »

Tips To Save Money In Your Business Using Technology

Monday, May 17th, 2010
Tips To Save Money In Your Business Using Technology

Tips To Save Money In Your Business Using Technology

Business owners are always looking for ways to save money in running their business. Adopting technology in the daily operations of your business is a good way to acheive this.

Here are a few ways your business can save money by using technology.

Adopting A Paperless Office Strategy

Invoicing, accounting, HR and other business processes can be automated. Automating these processes will save you and your staff a lot of time and money. Your customers would also benefit if you automate these process as it will enable you serve them better.

Adopting Instant Messaging Systems

Using Yahoo/MSN Chat, Skype, VOIP calls, video chat, project management software and the various cloud document storage facilities available, will empower you and your staff to get more work done even from remote locations and eventually make your business more efficient and profitable.

Adopting Open Source Solutions

When it comes to ways to save operating costs in running your business, we are strong advocates of adopting free and Open Source software. If you can’t spend money to get the original software, rather than opting for pirated software, we recommend you use open source software.

Adopting A Social Media Strategy

Do you know how much it costs to personally create a Facebook page or Twitter account to promote your business within your local community or to your target audience? Nothing! Its only when you cannot afford the time to do so yourself that you need to get a Social Media Expert like Mauco Internet Consultants to do same for you. Many small businesses have cut marketing back to social media alone and have seen substantial returns from focusing their efforts on a medium that truly works.

These are just a few tips we feel you can implement to save money in your business using technology. If you’ve got tips to share or ways you’ve used technology to cut work hours and save money, be sure to let us know about them in the comments below or on our Facebook page.

Posted in Articles, Business Success, IT Solutions, Internet Business Solutions, Online Business, social media | 5 Comments »

How To Start A Successful Small Business

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Starting a  business in any economy can be a very daunting task. But that’s not to say that it’s impossible or unadvisable. There are dozens of successful entrepreneurs who are doing quite well despite the challenges.

So what are some of the things you need to keep in mind when starting your own business? What I’ve personally come to realise by interacting with a couple of entrepreneurs over the years is that there’s no silver bullet or magical formula to success, you just have to take it step-by-step an work very hard. Here are some of the steps that you need to take:

Start Small

This obviously is a no brainer because most businesses have very humble beginnings in garages or college dormitories and with a shoestring budget but in time they grow to be global giants. So as the saying goes, do not despise the days of humble beginnings.

Learn From Others

If you are a one-man-show, then self doubt is naturally unavoidable when you start your company. You must realize that things will certainly go wrong and when they do, you’ll have no one but yourself to blame. So its best to join business groups, forums and associations so that you can have an opportunity to learn from others. Fortunately today, there are several networking sites like LinkedIn, Xing etc, where you can tap from a huge wealth of knowledge and resources.

Reading books alone is not the answer! Because what you read and what you have to execute are often as different as light and darkness. It’s best to have a mentor who can show you the ropes in a practical way! Reading alone is a sure way to failure because there’s a lot of things you won’t understand until you actually do it.

Go Out And Get Customers

No business can exist without customers. Know who your customers, where they hang out and go get them. Its a good idea to have a website that can act as your virtual storefront 24/7. Even if you can’t afford a website, you can at the very least get a Facebook page or where you can interact with your customers. Your existing and potential customer can have access to information about your business and what value they can derive from doing business with you.

Formalize Your Business

As soon as possible, register your company or business name, start proper bookeeping and get a corporate bank account. Seek the services of a good lawyer or accountant to help get your business documents in order. Once you have formalized your business then you are bound to take it as a serious business.

Know Your Competitors

Always keep tabs on what your competitors and what they are doing. Figure out their strengths and weaknesses and learn from same. Try to distinguish your business from your competitors. Stick to what you know best and don’t try to be everything to everyone.

These are some of the steps you will have to take to start a small business. Remember as a small business you can afford to be dynamic and explore new innovations and opportunities and don’t be too rigid.

Have we left out any step you feel is vital in starting a small business? Feel free to share your views with us by commenting below.

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Posted in Articles, Business Success, Website Design, management, social media | 2 Comments »

5 Benefits of Twitter for your Business

Monday, February 15th, 2010
5 Benefits of Twitter for your Business

5 Benefits of Twitter for your Business

Twitter has become the rage on the internet in recent times and has grown to become a valid business application. Twitter is now the tool of choice for most online marketers due to its high ROI. So if you have been ignoring Twitter, here are five reasons why you should start considering integrating Twitter into your marketing strategy.

  1. With Twitter, businesses can extend their reach, create buzz, listen to their communities and network with customers, prospects and industry experts!
  2. with Twitter’s Lists feature, if you are able to get yourself unto relevant lists with the right audience, your tweets may appear all over the web if you can get onto lists.
  3. Twitter is a means of getting your message out to more people and since other social media sites (Facebook, LinkedIn) have applications that you could use to link them to your twitter account, this means your tweets can travel to a wider audience beyond Twitter.
  4. With the aid of Twitter, you can build valuable business networks that you can learn from. Selecting the right people in your industry to follow would help keep you abreast of latest developments in your niche market
  5. With the aid of Twitter’s real-time search capability, you can find out what your customers are saying about your brand and about your competitors. This would help you identify which areas you need to improve over your competion. So if you have been having doubts about having a Twitter account, its time to put your doubts to rest. Signup for a Twitter account and claim your space on Twitter before your competitor does!

Are there other benefits of having a Twitter account that you think we have left out? Please feel free to mention them below. Your comments are welcome. You can also follow us on Twitter @mauconline .

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Posted in Articles, Branding, Business Success, Free Online Tools, Internet Business Solutions, Online Business, social media | 5 Comments »

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