Posts Tagged ‘social media’

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.

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.

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.

How To Use LinkedIn To Grow Your Business

Saturday, February 6th, 2010
How To Use LinkedIn To Grow Your Business Online

How To Use LinkedIn To Grow Your Business Online

These past couple of weeks, we’ve been bombarded by clients asking us how they can best take advantage of LinkedIn and and other networking sites to grow their business. This has spurred us to write this post with a few tips on how to use LinkedIn to grow your business online.

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 8.5 million professionals from around the world representing 130 industries. People use LinkedIn as a tool to grow their database of contacts, find new ideas, partners, identifying the right people at as a customer or prospect  and opportunities for growing their business in their chosen industry.

So how can you use LinkedIn to grow your business:

  1. When you have significant news about changes in your business, new product/service lunchings etc, a good platform to announce such is to update your profile on LinkedIn with this information. This creates instant awareness to all persons you are connected to on LinkedIn.
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  3. You can use LinkedIn as a channel to connect with old colleagues and classmates who may now be prospects or potential customers of your products or services.
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  5. By joining specialized groups on LinkedIn, you are in a position to gain expert advice and gather a broader perspective on how others in the same industry are able to cope with different challenges in the industry and also about your competitors.
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  7. If you have a company website, you can place a link from your LinkedIn company profile to your company website and vice versa, just as we have done on our Mauco company profile on LinkedIn. This thereby helps to improve your visibility on search engines like Google. When people now search for you or your company online, they now have various channels from which get a proper understanding about you, your product and services.
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  9. By your meaningful contributions to in group and forum discussions on LinkedIn and answering questions raised by other LinkedIn users, you are able to position as a leader in your industry and hopefully by word of mouth, referrals, etc you would be able to increase your client base.
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These and many more are some of the benefits you derive from creating a profile on LinkedIn. Do you have a linkedin Profile? What other benefits have you got from having a LinkedIn profile? Feel free to comment below. You comments are welcome.

5 Benefits of Social Media Marketing for your Business

Sunday, January 31st, 2010
social media marketing

social media

Here at Mauco Internet Consultants this past few weeks, we’ve been trying to sensitize our clients on the benefits of social media and the need to adopt some form of social media marketing into their marketing mix. We thought it would be nice to share with you some benefits of social media marketing for your business. So what is social media and how can it benefit your business?

Social media marketing is the process of promoting your website or business through social media channels like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Today a rapidly growing number of small businesses are including social media ideas and strategies in their goals. The immense number of people who participate in social media websites has led to increased investment in the growing field of social media marketing.

If it isn’t already, social media marketing should be an integral part of your marketing mix. Social media marketing is a long term and time consuming investment and if done properly, can be very rewarding. This doesn’t mean that you have to jump on the bandwagon and launch an account on Facebook or Twitter for your business without giving some taught to the basics.

Often the social media channels you choose depends to a large extent on your product/service and your target audience. Let’s highlight just 5 benefits of social media makreting in your business.

Benefits:

  1. The natural nature of social media marketing means your brand is exposed to large groups of people in a spontaneous fashion. This differs from paid advertising which has overt commercial overtones.
  2. Social media marketing is defensible because once successfully mastered and implemented in your business, the social communities that you gather can be a great source of web traffic on top of any traffic you are already receiving from search engines.
  3. If done properly social media marketing guarantees low cost and high returns. If done by yourself, social media marketing costs are limited to only the time you spend on the site. But having your social media marketing campaign implemented by a professional is often better asthe benefits will often exceed the cost.
  4. It complements other efforts. Social media optimization and marketing is usually community-specific. It doesn’t interfere with any other methods of getting traffic to your website. It can and will fit perfectly with an advertising campaign targeting other websites or search engines.
  5. Social media marketing doesn’t directly make you money. Rather it helps you generate a community of fans who are interested in your website or brand and will help you advertise same through word of mouth. This in turn will eventually lead to the purchase of your brand.

The viral nature social media marketing is what makes it so interesting and worthwhile. A successful Social Media Marketing campaign leads to a lot more talk about your brand and website online. When your message works with your users, they will spread your message more effectively than tradition methods.

So, are you using social media marketing strategies in your small business? What has been your experience or challenges of using social media marketing in your business? What are your thoughts about using social media marketing in your business? Please share your comments below. Till next time….