Category Archives: Website

Website design and production, website management

Does Your 2012 Internet Marketing Plan Include SEO?

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In one day alone, millions of people search the Internet, looking for information about companies, products and services. If your Website is not fully optimized on an ongoing basis, you are losing out on a large pool of potential customers.

Even if you have a great Website, it must be optimized so it can be found.

Your Website is a big investment. It seems only logical that you’d do all you can to ensure that your customers and prospects can find it?

How are you measuring your Website’s effectiveness and your return on your investment (ROI)? You need an ongoing search engine optimization (SEO) plan to make sure you will reach your goals and increase your ROI on an ongoing basis.

SEO is only one part of an Internet marketing plan, but it is the most important part. SEO is an essential element to capture business online.

The single most overlooked part of Website development is an ongoing SEO plan. Without a good plan in place your chance of increasing business through your Website is limited. SEO allows you to effectively target prospective buyers of your products and services.

The best SEO plans are designed to provide ongoing and proactive strategic planning, analysis, optimization, link building, reporting and analytics to ensure your customers and potential customers can find you.

The benefits to you and your business will include: brand visibility, effective customer acquisition, accessibility, repeat business, targeted prospects credibility, increased brand perception and getting found.

SEO services include different types of tools to use, organic or paid, associated costs and SEO packages if you are going to outsource your SEO. It includes developing informative content for you Website and working using social media. Organic SEO is essentially a strategy and no real guarantees can be set for its effectiveness. However, the main objective is to move your Website higher in rankings and maintain its long-term visibility.

No ethical SEO professional can offer a number one position guarantee for any major search engine. However, a top 10 or 20 ranking is attainable with hard, ongoing work and relevant keywords.

If you are want some type of guaranteed inclusion, you should consider paid search and inclusion programs such as Google’s Ad Word, which can help boost your SEO results.

SEO management is hard work. You won’t see instant results. It could be days, weeks or even months before your Website begins to move up in rankings. No ethical SEO professional can speed up the process.

If you do anything new in 2012 to help boost your sales, it must be Internet marketing SEO.

It’s All About Branding! For Farms and More.

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In today’s saturated marketplace, all businesses must be aware of their brand image. The value of a strong brand lies in the impression left with anyone who comes in contact with your business. It’s how your customers see you. Branding is not just about logos or updating your Website, it’s the entire feel associated with your business.

It’s the same for agricultural businesses, farms and rural communities.

A farm’s brand is your public identity, drilled down into one image or representation. It’s a positive image that evokes an emotion or automatic association. It stands in place of a long description of your farm and its products.

Branding your farm really makes it easier for customers to buy from you. It helps your customers associate your brand with quality, good service, good selection and value. This makes it easier for you to sell your farm products.

Good branding is an art. It’s a strong partnership of strategy, memorable words and graphic design. Creating a strong brand is a key component towards growing your business. A well-developed brand saves time, retains current customers, invites new customers, and will increase your sales and profits.

I experienced a well-developed brand campaign this weekend – The Farm / Art Dtour in Reedsburg, Wisconsin. It was a 50-mile tour through the beautiful and scenic Sauk County countryside. Throughout the drive, I saw working farms (in valleys, on hills, on the plains), farm-based art works (haystacks made into a huge Monarch butterfly caterpillar, Stonehenge: more like hayhenge and much more), artist-built mobile culture stands (full of fruits, vegetables and more), and field notes (signs with rural facts, such as: did you know that 90 percent of dairy milk in Wisconsin is made into cheese?).

The large collaboration of community support helped spread the campaign. It was a great example of how farmers can benefit by aligning cooperatively under a single brand. And, it showed what it takes for a farm and its community to make a business, and the area it’s in, successful.

Broad recognition and visibility are the hallmarks of a successful brand marketing campaign. I came off this drive feeling firsthand the value of local food and farm products. Without saying one word to push me to buy this or that, this tour encouraged me to buy Wisconsin-based agricultural products.

It’s about food and farming. It’s about branding. And, yes, it’s the entire feel done right!

The Internet’s Impact on Your Marketing

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To succeed in today’s fast-paced business environment, you need to aggressively transform your marketing, communications and advertising plan. You need to focus taking risks with new directions on the Internet.

If you leverage and refresh your existing strategies, the possibilities are endless to gain competitive advantage. You should incorporate new media and techniques on the Web. To be successful, your online promotional plan must be closely woven with all your marketing activities.

With great strategy, planning and focus, you will achieve the reach you want with your marketing and advertising budget. The greatest challenge is choosing the strategies that are right for your business and to integrate them with your marketing and advertising initiatives.

It’s important to think strategically about your marketing choices in order to maximize the success of your program and to select the right tactics.

What are your goals? Enhance brand awareness, improve online visibility, boost traffic to your Website, increase online sales or boost offline sales? If your main goal is to build brand awareness on the Web, focus on activities that encourage public discussion about your company, such as thought leadership activities (white papers, articles, case studies, and best practices research), public relations and social networking activities. If your key objective is to drive online sales leads, then do more direct-response activities such as e-mail marketing and paid search advertising.

The Internet has changed the dynamics of the business world. Customers are going to the Internet to start their purchasing process. In order to stay competitive, businesses need to embrace and use inbound marketing techniques to get found online.

Who are your target customers? You need to find out where your audience hangs out on the Internet. Then use those social media platforms to publish your information and collaborate with your customers on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and others.

Using only traditional outbound marketing techniques such as trade shows and print advertising is less effective nowadays, because people are better at blocking out interruption-based or pushed messages. The Internet presents quick and easy ways for customers to learn and shop to pull information when and where they want it. Instead of flying across the country, a prospect needs only to go to the Internet and research products and services.

Another important consideration for your marketing strategy is whether your company is in the business-to-business or business-to-consumer niche. What type of industry are you in? How is your market structured? All of these will affect your approach to marketing. It’s important to tailor your tactics and approach to your business environment and where your customers can be found on the Internet.

The structure of your market and industry will influence your selection of tactics. If your market is saturated, pursue innovative approaches to stand out from your competition, such as a thought-provoking video. Your video must have a news hook.

If you are in an emerging field, invest resources into educating the public through articles and white papers online.

If your product or service is very complex or difficult to understand, use tactics that enable you to conduct discussions with your audience through forums, chats, blogs and social media platforms such as FaceBook, LinkedIn and Twitter.