WSI Matrix is an consulting company in Edmonton, AB serving local businesses. We specialize in building an online presence for local businesses, optimizing their websites and driving targeted traffic.
Tuesday, 30 October 2012
The Best Advice To Achieve Internet Marketing Success
It takes some effort to become successful on the web. Internet marketing has many similarities to traditional marketing, but there are many important differences that are unique to this type of marketing platform. Technology has enabled consumers to make quick judgments as to what kind of marketing messages they want to hear, so it is important that you be able to get their attention and grab on to it. If you want some advice this approach, read through this article.
First, make sure that you know who your audience is. Although practically anyone in the world with web access can visit your website, you need to focus your message on the group that will benefit the most from your product or service. If you are just starting out, you may want to limit your market coverage to more local geographic regions. If business goes well, then you can expand.
Learn where your target audience likes to interact on the web, such as forums in subject areas of interest. These are good places where you can observe consumer behavior just by reading about the issues and questions that are posted. Take notes on the common topics, and think in terms of how your business can meet their needs. If you want to interact instead of just observe, introduce yourself properly. If you have an answer to a question, answer the question politely and professionally. Never sound like you are selling your wares because that turns off the forum participants.
Consider buying ad space on sites that your customers frequent. This is a way to give your company exposure to the very group of customers who may find your service or product useful. You have limited ad space on your ad banner, so think of keywords that you can use in a short but effective marketing phrase. It may be a good idea to offer an incentive to click on your ad, like a discount or something for free.
On your website, keep your content fresh and relevant at all times. Be sure that none of your links are broken, because when a customer lands on a page that does not exist, that is a sure way to discourage him from coming back. Make it as easy as possible for your visitors to see details of your product or business so they can see exactly how your business can help them. Your contact information should be clearly displayed on each page.
Do not forget about social media. Give your customers incentive to stay connected with you through platforms like Facebook or Twitter by posting special deals just for your followers. This will motivate them to maintain this interaction with you.
By following these suggestions, you can boost your Internet marketing effectiveness and improve your customer relationship. This will take time to develop, so be patient and monitor your progress. Adjust your marketing campaign throughout the year if your business is affected by seasonal factors. By putting some effort into this, you will see your customer base grow.
Saturday, 27 October 2012
Focus On Customer Service For Effective Internet Marketing
The current economy has made the average consumer very conservative about their spending. They are becoming more selective in what they buy and who they do business with. For businesses, things have become more competitive as they vie for the attention of consumers. This raises the bar for customer service. In order to excel in business, you must put your customer first. Read this article for some valuable suggestions on what excellent customer service means.
Your customers value their privacy. There have been too many reports of unscrupulous businesses collecting and selling customer information to outside parties for a profit. This is an unethical practice. As a merchant, you should never collect any personal information on your customers without their approval. If you need personal information, say for setting up an account, you must be clear about how you will will use that information. If that trust is violated, you can do irreparable damage to your business reputation.
Offer your customers exactly what they need. Solicit opinions and use their feedback to improve your business. Some merchants make the mistake of focusing too much on the product and not enough on the customer. That leads to a risk of developing a product in the wrong direction. Consumer opinions are very important in building a business, so take every opportunity to get feedback whenever you can.
Offer something for free whenever you can. "Free" is the magic word that can motivate someone to visit a website. Free shipping or a free gift with purchase can always spark some interest. Consumer research has shown that when the average customer who takes advantage of a free offer always ends up buying more.
If you have customers who have willingly offered their information and they have created accounts with you, you need a tool to organize that customer information. Find a reliable customer relationship management (CRM) tool to help you organize and plan. A good CRM application can help you keep track of each customer's preferences, purchases, correspondences with you, and other aspects. For instance, if a birth date was given, a CRM system can alert you to that so you can offer your customer a personal reward on that particular date. This personalized attention can have big impact on your customer.
You should have a good profile of your average customer. You should extend it further by thinking about what related services would be relevant to them. Write these down, then look for reputable businesses in these areas whom you can partner with as an affiliate. Combining offers and incentives can be mutually beneficial for you and your affiliate in that both your businesses can potentially gain new customers.
If you can keep your focus on your customer, your business strategies will fall into place. Always give your customers the respect and attention that they deserve. Answer their questions promptly, and resolve any order problems as quickly as possible. Good merchants will be highly recommended and will receive good reviews. If you can focus your marketing approach this way, you will stay well ahead of your competitors.
Friday, 26 October 2012
Mobile Marketing
How to engage prospects on the move
Devise a mobile marketing strategy and accelerate your business productivity and profitability. Define your goals: Is your intention to step-up sales, create a constructive marketing database, engage with your customers, or all three?
Here are simple yet effective mobile marketing ideas to promote your business:
Tuesday, 23 October 2012
Mobile Marketing Tools And Techniques
Have you ever advertised your products via mobile marketing? If not, it is time to think about launching a mobile marketing campaign. Read this article to find out more about different mobile marketing tools and techniques.
Sending out text alerts is a great way to keep your customers updated about your latest products and to share discounts and coupon codes. You should place a subscription form on your site or blog and advertise your text alerts as a way of getting exclusive content. Add a disclaimer to say that the phone numbers customers share with you will remain private. Enter the phone numbers into a mass texting software and use this software to send out text alerts. Keep your messages short: share a coupon code, a short announcement or a link to your mobile website. All your text alerts should include a link or a code to unsubscribe from your distribution list.
Create a mobile website to share updates about your latest projects, coupon codes and basic information about your business. There are many different mobile website building tools you can use but make sure you build a site that is easy to navigate. Keep the design simple and avoid using pictures so that your site can be loaded quickly. Test your site with different browsers and devices to make sure all your customers will be able to access it. Update your site regularly with new coupon codes and fresh content but keep in mind that your mobile site should not contain as much information as your regular site or blog.
If your customers own iPhones or Android phones, you should consider developing an app. You can offer your app as a freebie to reward your customers for their purchases or make it available to everyone on your mobile website. Be original and create a quality app that will be fun and useful. You could for instance create a game related to your product, design an app that allows people to customize your products and share their creations with each other. You could also create an app that functions as a catalog of your products.
If your customers own smartphones, you could use QR codes in your publications. A QR code is a small picture that a smartphone owner can scan thanks to the camera of their phone: the QR code is then interpreted as a link. If you have ads in magazines, newspapers or send flyers and posters to your customers, place a QR code somewhere on your publication and invite your customers to scan it to get a discount code or learn more about your latest product. This could be a great way to get more traffic to your mobile website.
A lot of people use their mobile phones to access social networks. If you use social media marketing to advertise your products, you should look for ways to combine both campaigns. You could for instance share links to your mobile site on Facebook or Twitter or organize contests to get people to snap pictures of your store, billboards or of themselves using your products with their phones and upload them on social networks.
These mobile marketing tools and techniques should help you put together a campaign that is adapted to your audience. Try new tools and techniques, follow new trends and keep looking for new ways to interact with your audience.
Saturday, 20 October 2012
What To Do When Your Mobile Marketing Campaign Goes Wrong
Ideally, every marketing campaign will result in waves and waves of business. The reality of the situation is that many advertising campaigns actually fail. Mobile marketing contains a wide range of different advertising methods that each have their own pitfalls. One wrong choice and your campaign goes from success to tragic failure. Read on for ways to deal with a failed mobile marketing campaign.
First off, you need to know that your campaign has failed. This means building the ability to track its success into the campaign. This is even more important if you have more than one ad out at the time. How do you know that it's your mobile marketing that is not producing results? If you do not have a way to track results, you won't know if its your mobile, social, or more traditional campaign that is not bringing in the targeted customers. You may also want to look at your expectations. If you were expecting a response rate of 20% from a media that only traditionally garners a response rate of 1 or 2 percent, your campaign has not necessarily failed; you have just set the bar far too high.
Once you know that your campaign truly did not succeed, it is time to learn from what you have done. Make sure to take other factors into account when looking at why your plan failed. For example, if another competitor launched a big campaign the same time you did, it can have a large impact on your success. In this case, your ad may have been great, but too much attention was drawn away from it by your competitor for it to be a big hit. Other factors to consider is suitability for the media and to your target audience. Make sure that your target audience is actually the people that buy your product. For example, you will have a difficult time reaching seniors in a mobile web campaign. This is simply not a media that these people typically use.
Now that you know what went wrong, take the time to see what went right. It may be tempting to dismiss your failure and start from scratch, but this would be a grave mistake. Learning from your mistakes also means using the parts that went well. In fact, these small successes will probably stand out better than they would have in a profitable campaign. You can use these small wins to give your next campaign a solid grounding and increase your chances for a favorable outcome.
There is actually a strong probability that your first few campaigns will not meet expectations. Mobile advertising is a skill, and just like any other, you will need to grow and develop it over time. If you gave up every time you didn't triumph right away, you wouldn't be in business. In advertising, just as in business, stay positive, stay tough, and stay focused in order to achieve the rewards you know you deserve.
Friday, 19 October 2012
Internet Marketing Help
Proven strategies to market your company
The Internet offers numerous possibilities to promote your business and product. At your disposal is a tremendous tool with a global reach that you can leverage to ensure the success of your business.
Let’s look at some key Internet marketing steps you need to take to get started:
Wednesday, 17 October 2012
Using Smart Phones to Market Your Business
More and more people are using smart phones as their primary connection to the world around them. The amount of power packed into such tiny devices is astounding. There are many ways to market your business with these devices, so it is not wise to ignore them as a possible advertising platform.
Some of the old marketing methods, such as text messaging or multimedia messaging, do not have to be abandoned just because these phones have further capabilities. These methods are still a very cost-effective medium for offering past customers an incentive to return to your business. For example, the best text message ads are coupon codes. These ads have improved in that you can now also include a link to your web page where customers can either learn more, or even make their purchase right there and then.
Mobile websites are another great way to connect with customers, both new and old. These mini websites give you great freedom to interact with people very similarly to how you would in a full site. The only difference is that mobile sites allow for the fact that smart phones have very small screens and often have slow download speeds. You want to make your mobile site look just like your full sized one, only with just the bare essentials. Tablets often register as mobile devices, but really have the power to use your full sized site, so be sure to give them a link to change between the two versions.
One very underutilized form of mobile marketing is QVC codes. These are specialized symbols that phones can load into their phone through the device's camera. From there, there are many apps available to interpret these codes. While customers will have to be at a specific physical location to scan the code, they are great for pushing impulse purchases. A coffee shop, for example, might use a code that gives the customer a coupon for half off a cookie when they buy a certain dollar amount of coffee products. When placed near the ordering area, this will help push customers into buying more than they would have otherwise because they think they are getting a good deal.
While most businesses do not have the budget to create their own app, there are other ways to use the app craze to your advantage. Many game developers need to offer their games for free in order to get enough downloads. They still want to make a profit, so they have had to find other ways of earning money from their apps. One channel that they have used is in-app purchases. The other is through in-game advertising. These ads usually take the form of tiny banner ads that sit at the top of the screen as long as the game is open. This is where your business can get into the app market with a small budget.
Ignoring mobile marketing as a valid way to increase your customer count is a mistake. New technology offers many different formats for you to interact with your customers. Decide what method is best for your business, then sit back and watch your profits grow.
Sunday, 14 October 2012
Mobile Marketing Basics
Mobile marketing is one of the newest ways to promote your business, but by no means is it ineffective. As mobile devices become more and more a part of daily life, this will become on of the primary ways that your business can reach out to potential customers.
Text messaging is the oldest form of mobile marketing. In this case your ad will consist of a short text message. You won't have the benefit of pictures, sound, or video to help convey your message. Keep your statement clear and to the point. The best text marketing campaigns either direct your customers to your website or offer them a short term coupon code to help draw them in. Make sure to do a little research on the company you choose to market with- many companies have gained a bad reputation for sending out spam.
The next tier up from text messaging is multimedia messaging. These messages contain text, pictures, and video. While still not as rich as full web experience, these messages allow you to d the same things that a traditional text message would do, only with the ability to make things a bit more interesting. Remember that phones will only display certain kinds of images, so take the time to make sure your ad is compatible with as many devices as possible. You also need to make extra sure that your customers a opt in as many carriers charge extra for multimedia texts.
Mobile web is where you can start to truly get creative with your advertising. These mini web pages allow you to do essentially anything you could do in a traditional page. The main difference is that these pages will be displayed on a much smaller screen with a lower bandwidth than home computers. That means that, while you have quite a bit of creative freedom, you need to keep your page simple and to the point. Great mobile sites are simply stripped down versions of your main web page. As mobile tech improves you will want to allow customers to choose between the mobile site and the full version. Tablets especially will often register as a mobile user, but because of their larger size and power, will probably do just fine on a full website.
Apps have just recently gained attention as the way we will be interacting with our mobile world in the future. There are two ways to work with potential customers within apps. You can have your own app for your business, which will be an extremely expensive and time consuming process, or you can purchase advertising within another app, usually a tiny banner within a game. Both of these are valid ways to reach customers, and the numbers of potential customers that see your ad is only limited by your budget.
Each type of mobile marketing has its own unique challenges. What type you choose depends mostly on what your needs are. Some are only good for reaching out to established customers, while others are great for finding new ones.
Friday, 12 October 2012
Social Media Management
There is more to social media than Likes, Fans and Tweets.
Many believe that tweeting and updating regularly on Twitter and Facebook means being socially active online. As a business owner, however, you need more than that to engage the right audience and fuel lead generation.
Wednesday, 10 October 2012
Four Tips For Using Mobile Marketing in Your Business
Mobile marketing is a great method for promoting your business. Technology has grown to the point where more people are finding new businesses through their phones than ever. No matter what you are promoting, you can use mobile marketing to your advantage.
There are many different methods of marketing to cell phone users, and you need to decide what type, or types, will work best for your campaign. Text and multimedia messaging services are still alive and well, as these simple messages can be sent to any cell phone user, not just the ones with smart phones. Because of the prevalence of smart phones; however, there are other methods you should consider. QVC codes, mobile web, and app based advertising all make use of the unique abilities of smart phones to interact with customers in new and exciting ways.
First off, you need to decide what your advertising goals are. Are you trying to attract new customers or increase repeat business? What demographics are you trying to reach? Do you need something quick and effective or can you make a larger investment that will have an increased long term payoff? Once you know what you are trying to achieve doing a little research into the various advertising methods can make it easy to decide what your advertising format will be.
Once your campaign is set up you will need a way to track your progress. There are several ways to do this, but the easiest is probably coupon codes. The amount of the coupon does not need to be large, but by using these codes you can get a pretty good idea of just how many people are responding to your ads as a good portion of them will use the code. You can even create several codes and track separate campaigns at the same time, or if you are unsure of your customer base, you can use different codes for different demographics. If you find lots of redemption from unexpected sources you know that your coupon has been shared over the social media and you are getting even more bang for your buck.
If you are not getting the results you want it may be time to change your strategy. Mobile marketing is an evolving field and even the experts don't get it right every time. The most important thing is to learn from your mistakes. Evaluate your results, do some more research, and try again. A successful business is one that does not overreach itself in any one marketing campaign. Sometimes you may have everything right, but unexpected events may stop customers from responding to your ad. That is why analysis of the data is important- you need to know why the previous campaign failed before you design your next ad.
Now that you know how to create a successful advertising campaign it is time to get started. Stay positive, and learn from your mistakes as well as your successes and your business will on the right track for further growth.
Sunday, 7 October 2012
Things to Think About While Designing a Mobile Marketing Campaign
Mobile marketing can be a great way to get new business, but if not used properly, it can also cause great damage. You are advertising on one of the most personal devices a person owns and you need to be respectful of that. Do your research beforehand so you do not end up upsetting your customers or breaking any laws.
When remembering that this is a very personal medium, you can also use this to your advantage. You can use names and past shopping history to help tailor your advertising to each customer very easily. On the other hand, you need to keep from coming off as invasive or creepy. Keep personal details to a minimum- names and maybe birthday wishes. You do not want upset customers freaking out because your ads come off stalkerish, or even worse, having their personal information stolen because of your message.
Many phone companies charge per service, and because of this you are legally required to have customers opt in to your messages. A double opt-in procedure, as well as an easy way for people to get off your mailing list, is the industry standard to ensure that your messages are not considered spam. You will probably be working with a service when using any kind of messaging ads, so it is imperative that you do your research on the company you are using. A good company will help you set up all of the standards mentioned, where as a bad one can destroy your business's reputation, as well as leaving you stuck in a mess of legal issues.
Different types of marketing have different requirements, and you need to be mindful of that. While text messaging requires an opt in system, mobile web requires the same kind of security that your main page does. Consider using either the same level of security that your main web page uses, or in the case of in-app purchases, you can utilize the OS's payment processing system to make sure your site is secure. Never, ever sell your customer's information. The loss of business and reputation will cost you far more than the money you might gain through the sale of information.
Ask for, and read, customer feedback. You may think that you are doing everything right, but when something goes wrong, having that feedback to know where your failures were will be absolutely priceless. Even if your campaign is successful, feedback will help you know what elements in particular made the campaign a success and what you need to change for next time.
Mobile marketing will become increasingly important as technology moves forward. More and more of daily life will be accessible through mobile phones and tablets. Getting ahead of the curve is important for many businesses in order to stay relevant in the future. That being said, there are many unique challenges that are present in this medium, and you need to respect those challenges if you want to be successful.
Friday, 5 October 2012
Website Optimization Services
Maximize the revenue potential of your business
An optimized website will generate qualified leads that convert into profitable sales. An experienced web optimization service provider can boost your search engine ranking and drive qualified leads to your website.
Here are four reasons why you should consider website optimization services to make your online business highly profitable:
Wednesday, 3 October 2012
How To Best Use SMS Marketing
Marketing can be tricky. There are many ways to go about it. One such way is by utilizing short message services (SMS). By using SMS, you can get your message out to mobile communication devices all over the world. Read on to learn how to get started with SMS marketing.
You need to first choose a keyword. Pick something relevant to your business that will catch the eye of the customer. Using keywords will help ensure that your messages are getting out to people who actually want to read them.
Make sure to keep your message short. The name, short message services, describes it perfectly. Not only do customers generally dislike longer messages, it's also impossible to send a single text containing a message that is overly long. Anything too long, and the SMS service will split what you have written up into more than one message. The last thing you want is for your instant message to be split up into multiple messages.
Remember to provide the option to discontinue messages. No one likes unwanted spam. A quick way to lose respect and customers is to make discontinuing messages impossible or overly difficult. Make sure the option to unsubscribe is obvious and simple to preform.
Use a two-fold process for subscriptions. After a customer signs up for messages, have them confirm that they meant to do so. Having them take an additional and simple step will cut down on customers annoyed over spam.
Try to personalize your messages. Whether it's a banner or a tagline, try to make your messages distinguishable from those of others. It is important that you stand out from the crowd as often as possible.
Stick with current events. Keep your messages relevant. Be aware of what is going on in the industry. Keep your customers up to date about the information they want to hear.
Reward your repeat customers with incentives and deals. Make them feel important. Be sure to advertise this with SMS.
Be sure to provide your contact information. Make sure that your business still appears human. Have your contact information readily available should customers need to contact you with any questions.
Offer exclusive deals and coupons. Your messages may contain plenty of useful information, but that doesn't mean customers will want to read them. Ideally, the content will be interesting enough to hold their attention once you have it. You still need to get them to read it in the first place. Give your customers a reason to sign up for messages. Include deals they will only have access to by signing up.
Have a reason behind every message you send. Don't flood inboxes with rambling messages about nothing in particular. Write your message out ahead of time and edit it heavily. Be sure that there is a clear message and purpose behind what you are about to send out.
SMS marketing can be a very effective tool when used properly. It is simple and inexpensive. Give it a try, and see if SMS marketing is a strategy that works for you.


