RDZigns

Marketing Needs to Start BEFORE…

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“Before what?” you ask. Before you actually launch something. Before you sell. Before you are even ready.

If you are going to start something new – the minute you decide that you are going to do it, is the right time to start marketing – do not make the mistake of waiting with your marketing until everything else is finished and ready for launch.

Sometimes it starts even earlier – I know people who start their marketing before they ever decide to do something. Just in case.

I recently talked to a couple of young founders. They are in the middle of building a new app which I think I am going to love. I asked them what they plan for market entry and they told me they are not ready for marketing. They would still need a few weeks to finish the product.

Really?Blackboard with text

… I told them they are wrong

These founders are not alone with their take on marketing and postponing the beginning of marketing for far too long. We have had clients calling and saying, we are launching something next week and we want you to send some tweets to push it.

Launching unprepared and without a headstart in today’s world is not just a mistake – it’s careless.

Well, I can send a couple of tweets for anything, but that won’t get you far if you do not have a strategy and a concept behind it. If you did not start your marketing and started building a brand a while before your launch, most likely the tweets will not sell the way this client expects them to.

There is not only a lot to plan, there is also a lot to build before you actually launch something – especially if you are new to the market and have no “brand” and fame to build on.

Marketing is not about an ad campaign or sending some press information to journalists

Social Media marketing is much more than a couple of tweets or a handful of Facebook updates.
Marketing is not about selling something for a few days. If you want to do that – hire a sales person and pay him by the hour.

Why Social Media is Important for Small Businesses

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If you’re one of the few small businesses that are not yet plugged into social media, you may be wondering what all the fuss is about. Do you really need to use it, or can you just get by with an optimized website and an e-newsletter? The short answer is yes, you need social media – at least you do if you want to reach customers and stay competitive. Here are just a few reasons why social media is so important for small businesses.

Your customers are already using it.

According to a 2011 report published by Nielson, Americans spend nearly a quarter of their online time on social networks and blogs. This means that chances are much of your target market is already using social media. If you want to reach clients and prospects, you need to be where they are – by using social media you’ll increase the odds that your marketing message will get through to a significant number of them. [Read more…]

How to Drive More Facebook Traffic to Your Website in 5 Easy Steps

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By Andrea Vahl

Would you like to drive more Facebook traffic to your website?

Is quality Facebook traffic important to your business?

Getting Facebook fans to your website (and then hopefully onto your email list) is even more critical with Facebook’s recent announcement of decreased organic reach for pages.

Use these five steps to help you get more traffic Facebook to your website.

#1: Make Sure You Have a Steady Stream of Shareable Content on Your Website

If you have a website that never changes, you’re going to struggle to get much traffic to it. Posting links to the same page on your site over and over is as futile as Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill.

These days, the name of the game is content marketing and you had better figure out how your business can participate.

The fresh, new content you post on your site is important—not only for social media marketing, but also for search engine optimization. Google rewards sites featuring fresh content with higher ranking. But you don’t have to post epic blog articles three times a week to win at the content marketing game. Posting something new and helpful once a week or even once a month can benefit your website traffic.

Here are some ideas that can help you brainstorm how you can add new content to your website:

  • Post a weekly tip about your niche. It doesn’t have to be long; a paragraph or two with a nice photo will do just fine. Start with the frequently asked questions that come in from your customers.
  • Post a weekly news bite with a photo about what is happening in your business. This works well for businesses that have events.
  • Curate a list of top 10 helpful articles from around the web that you found that week. Add a short sentence about why you liked them. Read More

Social Media Lingo – Terms It Won’t Hurt For You To Know

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by: Louis Foong

Like it, love it, hate it, but you simply can’t ignore it—social media is a common discussion topic and you’ve got to stay up to speed. Not because you need to be doing all of this and all the time, but you are expected to be aware of commonly used social media terminology.

Here I have compiled a list of 15 essential social media related terms that I find useful knowing about as a B2B marketing professional.

  1. Connections: This is kind of like the online version of your business network connections. As a LinkedIn user, these are other users you choose to ‘connect’ with. What can you do if you are a connection in someone’s LinkedIn network? You can view their ‘full’ profile instead of only their ‘public’ profile, you can send them a message in private and share updates with them.

  2. Circles: The community groups that can be built by users on Google+.

Five New Year’s Tips for Business Owners

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It’s a New Year, and that means it is time for New Year’s resolutions. For small-business owners, New Year’s resolutions, or goals, can be exciting and sometimes a little daunting because of the expectations that come with these goals. Setting goals for a small business is all about figuring out what will increase your business’s popularity and sales, as well as figuring out how to get more done in less time.Here are five tips on what small-business owners should consider when thinking about New Year’s resolution ideas and goals. [Read more…]