A short presentation with some tips to go beyond your standard direct mail and email campaign for small businesses on a budget. Includes: 1) Search Engine Marketing 2) SMS Text Message Marketing 3) Variable Data Printing/Dynamic Landing Pages 4) Social media resources (and stats)

1. Eric SalernoRedEmberMarketing.comesalerno@RedEmberMarketing.com Marketing Techniques Beyond Email and Direct Mail

2. On the Agenda: 1) Search Engine Marketing & Pay Per Click 2) Variable Data, Landing Pages and Direct Mail 3) SMS Text Message Marketing 4) Social Media

3. About This Presentation This presentation is: A 20 minute discussion of marketing ideas that go a bit beyond the standard direct mail and email campaign for small businesses on a budget. A quick review of social media resources (and statistics) for small businesses to look into. A quick introduction to SMS Text Message Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, and Variable Data Printing/Dynamic Landing Pages. A representation of only one person’s perspective in a sea of talented marketing professionals. This presentation is not: A definitive guide to all of your marketing options. Only you can decide where to make your investments. A comprehensive guide on maximizing the potential of Social Media participation. The last marketing presentation you’ll ever need to view.

4. Fighting Off the Biggest Threat If you’re not coming up with creative (or at least new) ways to maintain sales (heck, why not increase them) during tough economic times, the competition (who will outlast you) will.

5. Search Engine & Pay Per ClickPerspectives and considerations. Why pay for clicks/traffic? Answer: You probably shouldn’t if you’re not committed to monitoring and improving conversion rates, BUT… If you have good control over your website content and some compelling/valuable offers, pay per click is simply an exercise in arbitrage; ensure you’re customer acquisition costs are lower than the long term value of the customer.

6. Search Engine & Pay Per ClickPerspectives and considerations. Why pay for clicks/traffic? Answer: You probably shouldn’t if you’re not committed to monitoring and improving conversion rates, BUT… If you have good control over your website content and some compelling/valuable offers, pay per click is simply an exercise in arbitrage; ensure you’re customer acquisition costs are lower than the long term value of the customer. Will it help with natural search? Answer:Yes and no. When your natural search is working well, a paid add helps you dominate the top area of the SERP, so it’s more complimentary. When you’re not performing well in natural search results, paid ads help get your business recognized, and build a following which will slowly translate into improved natural search results.

7. Search Engine & Pay Per ClickPerspectives and considerations. What terms should you bid on? The more generic your keyword, the wider the audience, but the higher the competition. Relevance of your ad to the audience is also key to keeping minimum bids low. Fortunately, the number of keywords people are searching for at a time is slowly increasing. Try 2 and 3 word phrases first – look in your analytics data for keywords that were already working and use keyword research tools. Don’t forget to consider negative keywords to reduce unintentional clicks. Group keywords semantically for better correlation with ads. Other Tips: Consider geo-targeting for your local area. Try the Google Content Network. Consider Google Checkout for attention-grabbing button next to paid listings. Claim your Local Google Listing and add a coupon! Tools: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal http://www.google.com/sktool/ http://www.google.com/local/add/analytics

8. SMS Text Message MarketingThe power of immediacy is well… pretty powerful. Targeting the mobile (everyone?) crowd Why Try Mobile Marketing? 20% of consumers are using phones for email and 19% accessing internet on the go. 94% of texts are read, 75% are read instantly. Average redemption rates for text campaigns are 7%[6x higher than printed coupons] More than 1/3 of consumers that spend at least and hour online per week (who doesn’t fit that category?) say they are interested in receiving tangible incentives via their mobile device.

9. SMS Text Message MarketingThe power of immediacy is well… pretty powerful. Targeting the mobile (everyone?) crowd Why Try Mobile Marketing? 20% of consumers are using phones for email and 19% accessing internet on the go. 94% of texts are read, 75% are read instantly. Average redemption rates for text campaigns are 7%[6x higher than printed coupons] More than 1/3 of consumers that spend at least and hour online per week (who doesn’t fit that category?) say they are interested in receiving tangible incentives via their mobile device. Mobile Marketing Tactics: Target specific periods of specific days that need sales boosts. Move overstocked items or menu specials with exclusive deals. Fill seats on short notice when reservations are cancelled. Team up with another local business for a combo special. Run referral contests. Add mobile offer to receipts. Reward loyal customers with surprise exclusive offers. Provide multiple ways for customers to sign up.

10. Variable & Dynamic DataEnhancing direct mail, email and landing page performance It’s segmentation – fine grained as possible. Landing Pages: May use personalized URL’s but can also incorporate dynamic content based on information stored in a database. Example: A visitor from the hospitality industry visits a page and sees one combination of images and content. Another visitor from the manufacturing industry sees a completely different combination. Each views content relevant to them. Email: Use more than “First Name” and “Company” to personalize. Try using custom fields to add dynamic data to email content. Example: Create a field called “special offer” and add unique offers in each (via spreadsheet). When creating the email, insert the field contents, like a mail merge. This approach can also be used to insert a personalized URL. Direct Mail: Collect customer preference information to more accurately target them. Example: Travel tour company tracks regions customers are interested in and design print pieces that swap relevant images in/out based on data. A website address on the piece drives traffic to a “personalized URL”: YourCompany.com/Jane_Doe

11. Social Media in the Marketing MixStatistics, ideas and cautions. Why Social Media? You’ve probably seen some of these statistics before… If YouTube were a country, it would be the world’s third largest (Facebook would be #4!) Social networks & blogs are the 4th most popular online activities, beating personal email. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55- to 65-year-old females. 55.6 million adults – or just less than 1/3rd of the population – in the US now visit social networks at least monthly, according to Forrester Research. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations. It’s been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitorsduring this year. The not-so-distant future: In 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers and 96% of them belong to a social network.

12. Social Media in the Marketing MixStatistics, ideas and cautions. Where are your social media customers? Social networking sites used by US social network users, by generation (May, 2009) [% of respondents in each group] Even more (a lot more) Social Network statistics / resources: http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/2009-social-network-analysis-report/ http://mashable.com Social Media about Social Media!

13. Social Media in the Marketing MixStatistics, ideas and cautions. 12 social media selections to choose from Inserting yourself or your business is potentially the most daunting challenge. [#2 is participating consistently] Facebook * (The leading multimedia social network in the US with a popular mobile interface) MySpace * (Early leader multi-media social network for personal and corporate branding) Twitter (Continuous stream of 140-character status updates. Follow and be followed) LinkedIn * (Professional networking site – 36 million+ members #1 resource for recruiting) YouTube * (Video streaming – can create your own channel) Yelp * (Peer network of local business reviewers/commentators. Heavy on restaurant reviews) Flickr (More than 3.6 Billion user-submitted images on a searchable platform) Digg (News sharing service. Create a press release, start Digg-ing.) DailyMotion * (YouTube, only based in France, and popular world-wide.) MeetUp (Social media that facilitates in person events - imagine that!) StumbleUpon (Website sharing / social bookmarking site) Del.icio.us (Social bookmarking site) * Also represents a pay per click advertising opportunity. Yes, I know this is not even close to a complete list. Sorry if I left out any of your favorite(s).

14. Social Media in the Marketing MixStatistics, ideas and cautions. Brand Overviews HowSociable? – A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics Addict-o-matic – A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence socialmention – A social media search engine offering searches across individual platforms (eg blogs, microblogs) or all, together with a ’social rank’ score. Whether or not the score is transparent enough to be meaningful is open to debate. Blog Search Tools TECHNORATI Search – Technorati’s new search interface. Use it to find top blogs based upon inbound links only. TECHNORATI Advanced – Technorati’s advanced search page allows you to search for blogs (rather than posts) based on tags. Google Blog Search – Google’s index of blog posts. The advanced search tab allows you to search based on additional criteria. Very good for searching between specific dates. IceRocket – Blog search tool that also graph-ifies! BlogPulse – Search for blog posts by keyword. Developed by Nielsen BuzzMetrics. Buzz Tracking Serph – Track buzz in real time Google Trends – shows amount of searches and google news stories Trendpedia – Create charts showing the volume of discussion around multiple topics. Generates cool graphs. BlogPulse Trends – Compare the mentions of specific keywords and phrases in blog posts (LEFT vs. RIGHT) Omgili Charts – Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. Mostly from review sites/forums. eKstreme – blog data is obtained from Technorati and the social bookmarks come from del.icio.us. Message Board Search Tools BoardTracker – tracks words in forums BoardReader – Search multiple message boards and forums. Omgili – Omgili is a specialized search engine that focuses on “many to many” user generated content platforms, such as, forums, discussion groups, mailing lists, answer boards and others. Omgili finds consumer opinions, debates, discussions, personal experiences, answers and solutions. Google Groups – Searches usenet groups. Yahoo! Groups – Searches all Yahoo! Groups. Twitter Search Tools Twitter Search – Search keywords on Twitter which “self-refreshes”. See what’s happening — ‘right now’. Twitstat – Twitter Tweitgeist – Tag cloud for last 500 Tweets TweetScan – search for words on Twitter Twit(url)y – see what people are talking about on Twitter Hashtags – Realtime Tracking of Twitter Hashtags TweetBeep – Track mentions of your brand on Twitter in real time. Twitrratr – Rates mentions of your search term on Twitter as positive/neutral/negative TweetMeme – View the most popular Twitter threads occurring now. TwitScoop – Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentioned more often than usual and creates a tag cloud. Twilert – Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service. Web Site Traffic Compete – Competitor site traffic reports. Estimates only of monthly visitor data. Best used on large high-traffic Web sites. Quantcast – Use this on large high-traffic Websites. It allows you to compare multiple web sites in one handy chart. Estimates only of monthly visitor data. Alexa – Comparative site traffic reports. Includes estimated reach, rank and page views. BlogFlux Page Rank – Tells you Google Page Rank for a web page. Use this to compare different websites. Search Data Google Trends – Search trends and see search volume by country and region. Google Insights – Compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. Wordtracker Keywords – Displays average daily search volume of a given keyword or phrase. Yahoo! Keyword Tool – Displays search volumes for specific keywords and phrases for previous month’s search data. FACEBOOK LEXICON – Displays volume of wall postings for specific term(s). Similar to Google Trends. Not great with obscure terms. Google Keyword Tool – Generate keyword ideas for related keywords and search volumes. Multimedia Search YouTube – Search for videos and channels by keyword. MetaCafe – High-traffic video search engine. Google Advanced Video Search – Search for videos, what else? Flickr – Search Flickr for photos, groups or people/users. Truveo – Aggregate video search engine. Search videos from YouTube, MySpace, and AOL. Viral Video Chart – Displays top 20 most-viewed video (1, 7, 365 days). Includes view counts and charting. Guardian’s Viral Video Chart – Weekly roundup of what’s excellent on the web Social Bookmarking Digg – Social Bookmarking, mainly for news, images and videos StumbleUpon – Social bookmarking – general cool stuff Delicious – Social bookmarking Feed Aggregator Yahoo Pipes – Feed aggregator and manipulator. Set up pipes for news alerts and overviews. Generally Awesome. URL cruncher Bit.ly – URL cruncher with dashboard metrics enabling measurement of number of clicks, countries clicked from, conversations around url etc Specific Social Network Tracking Adonomics – Facebook analytics and developer application tracking and graphing. Search Engine rankings PageRank Checker – Shows Google page ranking Advertising and Event Tracking MediaHound – Competitive tracking and analysis; focus on technology B2B space Source: http://takemetoyourleader.com/2009/03/24/free-social-media-monitoring-tools/ Tactics to utilize/monitor social media Take it one step at a time, investigate each site, talk with peers, and determine where you (or your team) will focus your time. Facebook – Create a facebook page and start collecting fans, posting updates and events. Twitter – Use search.twitter.com/advanced to find opportunities based on keywords. TweetDeck offers more sophisticated tools. LinkedIn – Complete your profile [No, really. Go back and complete it.]Add links to your business sites. Add a LinkedIn company page.Monitor LinkedIn.com/Answers in your area of expertise for opportunities to contribute! YouTube – Create a channel that contains your multimedia content. Track views and direct traffic. Yelp – Monitor your reputation / reviews. Claim your business listing & consider advertising. MeetUp - Attend or organize an in-person meeting related to your business (or personal interest!) Multiplatform Search:http://trend.icerocket.com URL Shortener/Tracker:http://bit.lyAlso provides statistics on number of clicks on link and number of times used on Twitter.

15. Social Media in the Marketing MixStatistics, ideas and cautions. Do’s, don’ts & obstacles in the path to social media Zen Obstacles: All those coveted compliments and positive reviews are sometimes accompanied by some negative commentary. [The worst position to be in is completely oblivious] Be ready for it, accept it, and start the damage control. Get back on your horse and continue to strive for positive comments. Don’t: Deceive. Don’t pretend to be someone else or participate anonymously. Get defensive. If negative comments are already out there, offer ways to repair the relationship. Waste time in the wrong communities, or participate inappropriately in the right ones. Selectively filter comments on your blog. Do: Be authentic. Use your real name and be yourself. Engage in real, passionate discussions, (preferably with customers), and be respectful! Involve other team members, but follow an established online social media guideline that includes goals and some etiquette information

16. New Ideas for Old School ApproachesA fresh coat of paint and new perspective for some familiar techniques

17. New Ideas for Old School ApproachesA fresh coat of paint and new perspective for some familiar techniques

18. Contact Info: Eric SalernoRedEmberMarketing.comesalerno@RedEmberMarketing.com