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How To Make Your Business Stand Out Online

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Marketing is so much more than just the artistic and descriptive combination of words to sell a product. Visual marketing is just as important if you want to sell a product and make a statement. In fact, some of the very best marketing projects are based almost entirely on visual graphics and include very little words. Visual marketing has a way of capturing attention, eliciting emotions, and telling a story in a way that words can’t measure up to. If you would like to learn how to use visual marketing for the benefit of your company, here are some ways that you can come up with great visual marketing ideas.

Learn From Social Media Sites

Have you noticed how adeptly social media sites such as Pinterest use visual marketing? Why try to describe the perfect apple crumble cake when you can show a mouth-watering picture of one? As the old saying goes “a picture is worth a thousand words”, and in the world of online marketing, a picture may be worth much more than that if it helps to attract customers and generate more revenue for your company.  Facebook and Instagram, like Pinterest, are also driven by photographs and images to illustrate the life, interests and background of a person or a company. If you learn from popular social media sites such as these, you will have more success attracting a following through the use of visual marketing.

Let Your Followers Know You Are Real

In the world of online marketing it can be hard for customers to distinguish the line between virtual reality and actual reality. That is why you should let your followers know you are real by including a picture of you and your staff in the “About Us” section of your profile or website page. Your followers will automatically feel a sense of connection to you by simply being able to see who you are and that you are in fact real people. Depending on your target audience and the nature of your business you can make this picture professional, casual, or even humorous. Humor is a great way to utilize loyalty marketing and can make you more likeable to your followers. As all good online marketers know, if your followers like you they are more prone to be loyal to you and to share your page with their friends.

Make Your Product Look Different

Making your product stand out and look different is one of the most challenging tasks that a marketer will face. You need to make your product memorable if you expect to attract a loyal customer base, and you can do this by using visual marketing to your advantage. You can incorporate humor into your product images or use modest, child-like drawings to simplify your products and make them memorable. Whatever method you choose to use, stick with it and try to use that same type of visual marketing across the board so that people will immediately recognize it when they see it.

Use Bold Visuals To Draw Attention

If you are having a difficult time getting the attention of your customers, try using bold visuals to catch their eye. Whether you choose to incorporate humorous, beautiful or creative images, just make sure that they appeal to your target audience and attract more followers to your site.

If you feel like you have reached a stand-still in the world of online marketing, incorporate more visual marketing into your technique and you are bound to see positive results.

Attached Images:
  •  License: Royalty Free or iStock source: http://www.sxc.hu/pic/m/c/ca/caesantana/1407384_color_pencil.jpg

Dorian Travers is a contributor for The Marketing Robot. He keeps his readers informed on all things business.




QR Codes and How They Can Work For You

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For those of you not familiar with the term QR Code, which stands for quick response, I’m sure you’re still very familiar with seeing them. They’re practically everywhere these days. They’re on the backs of any product you can imagine. They’re on television commercials and print advertisements. Anywhere you can fit a little 1×1 square, you can put a QR Code. Since there are still some of use who haven’t been properly introduced to these little advertising goldmines, it’s no wonder that we also aren’t using them correctly. Joe Barber, who founded Third Screen Media, says we’re not using these codes to their full potential. In a recent article he discussed the renewed interest in these two dimensional codes, which have actually been around for over 20 years. They first showed up in Japan, being used on the automobile manufacturing line. There are good and bad ways to use your little advertisement boxes. First we’ll discuss some of the ways you shouldn’t use these QR Codes before getting into more productive ways of using them. Let’s take a look at a quick list here:

  1. Size: Don’t print a code to where it’s not big enough to be seen and scanned easily with a smartphone.
  2. Safety: Your code square shouldn’t be on billboards or other roadside areas which could cause traffic problems.
  3. Congestion: As with the freeway, don’t place your scanner codes in stairwells or other high foot traffic areas. This may seem counterproductive, since you want high traffic. But keep away from bottleneck situations.
  4. Lame: Don’t be! If customers don’t have a good experience with QR Codes, they’ll stop scanning them.
  5. Don’t Link Back: Resist the urge to just link back to the same place that customers are already at. If your QR Code on your restaurant menu takes customers to your online menu, that’s a complete waste.
  6. Simple: Don’t put the entire ad in the code. This is convoluted and harder to load.

Now that we have a grasp on what not to do, let’s see what Joe Barber says are a few good things to do with your QR Code bar. There are a few simple steps that Joe says will ensure higher traffic to your website and more clicks. Of course, this should eventually lead to more sales.

  1. Short URL: Using a shorter base url with extensions means you can change your ad campaign at a moment’s notice. This leads to more possibilities as your customers know they can keep coming back.
  2. Landing Page: Linking back to your landing page is a great way to track where your clicks are coming from. You can use this information to continue targeting that audience and tweak your ads specifically to them. Or you can determine why you’re not getting clicks from other demographics and chase them harder.
  3. Continue the Game: Even after a contest is over, you can keep those links active. Give some post-contest information or smaller games to keep the links alive.

One thing Joe wanted to remind everyone is that these QR Codes are really flooding today’s market. So much so, consumers are actually hunting out these code boxes. They’re pretty much expecting bonus features and extra content with every purchase. It’s a high demand for ad campaign managers to keep up with. Another warning that has been issued by many marketing analysts in Australia is the lack of creativity in these scanner codes. Australia has one of the highest per capita sales of smartphones and similar technologies. Yet they don’t even rank in the top 50 for QR Code ad campaigns. This is a two-fold problem. One, they’re not marketing the codes well enough to the target demographic. And two, they’re not offering content that will keep consumers clicking. Unless both of these are fixed, Australia will continue to fall farther behind.

Attached Images:

The Author Sergeo Young writes about technology and the use of it in film on Edictive blog, a film production site for film and broadcast professionals.

Why Internet Marketing Just WORKS

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When you hear the term “internet marketing”, what do you think of?

For many, that term conjures thoughts of websites or spamming or search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. For others, it’s all about graphical design, writing fancy code or even affiliate programs. All of those answers correct, but the essence of internet marketing is much simpler.

At its core, internet marketing is about these things:

* Understanding the target market to which the product/service/cause you’re marketing will appeal
* Determining exactly how your target market interacts with the internet
* Positioning your content on the internet to attract the attention of your target market
* Collecting information about your target market (also known as “leads”) for follow-up and conversion into sales
* Design of offers or incentives to induce the desired actions from your leads

Since there is insufficient space in this article to give all of these topics adequate attention, let’s focus on just one specific topic with the realm of internet marketing: Email Marketing.

My best payoff has always come by focusing on permission-based email marketing. Permission-based email marketing refers to the practice of collecting information (including email addresses) from website visitors and communicating with them via e-mail with their direct consent. The “permission” aspect of permission-based email marketing is what separates legitimate email marketers from the spammers that everyone despises.

My love of email marketing is strong for one reason: It works very well. Email marketing has been much like a never-ending goldmine: It enables us to produce income on demand simply by sending a good offer to our list. When you have thousands of loyal subscribers – as we do – and you put a strong and compatible offer in front of them, income becomes nearly automatic.

However, the key to successful email marketing is the development of a legitimate trust relationship with your subscribers. If you opt to send your subscribers a request for purchases every single day, they will likely tire of your badgering and cease reading your emails altogether.

Alternatively, if you take the time to provide good content to your readers on a regular and frequent basis, you’ll discover that your readers take all of your emails far more seriously, and as a result your emails will be opened, read and acted upon with greater frequency. Essentially, email marketing is really an exercise in trust.

Even though there are more sides to internet marketing than just email marketing (permission based), email has been the foundation that our business sits on.

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