Great new marketing ideas still happen, especially online.
Amazon has a website www.windowshop.com. Its a sort of virtual bookstore shop window. But with the capabilities of the web utilized to the max.
If you zoom in on an album cover, you hear an excerpt. If you zoom in on a book cover, you see and hear an excerpt from the text.
Like a shop window, they change it once a week. And of course, you can just click and add it to your Amazon shopping cart.
Brilliant!
It's been a piece of gospel for a long time that Flash and Google don't mix.
That's why we don't build websites all in Flash. They are never going to do well in the search engines.
While that is still generally true, it is not quite as true as it used to be. Google can and will now index some of the text in Flash movies/ slide shows, depending on how it is embedded in the file.
We just surpassed our total of new clients for all of last year!
Kudos to the staff for their assistance but I did want to point out how we accomplished this.
MARKETING SKILL
Ten months ago we developed a marketing strategy for us. We isolated what services we wanted to concentrate on, and how to use the Internet as the primary means of marketing to increase our own Business Development activity.
Well, I guess we really do know how to market, because it sure has worked in spades.
There are some larger lessons here which many businesses could apply:
Don't try to be all things to all men.Decide where your strengths are.
Develop a method of reaching out to potential customers which you can afford to execute in the volume it takes, that you feel has a realistic chance of success.
Give it your best shot, but be prepared to make adjustments or even abandon it if it isn't working.
That's a pretty general formula for success in Business Development. It does require some patience. If you have to succeed big RIGHT NOW - you have a problem.
It just warms my heart when I find someone that doesn't mince words. And except for his comment about surveys I agree with Dave on this one.
For a few years now, with the growth of the Internet, Yellow Pages and newspaper advertising (especially classifieds) have been in a decline.
Continue reading "Yellow Pages Continue to Crash and Burn" »
We launched a new look for our website this last week.
If you've seen the previous look, you'll notice it is MUCH higher impact visually.
Actually, we were kind of bored with the old look, but there are a few important points to make:
The biggest gain so far in the Christmas season sales is the extremely strong on-line sales performance. According to an articl ein today's St Pete Times:
Continue reading "Christmas Sales Get Off To An Excellent Start" »
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang defended the Internet search engine's cooperation with Chinese censorship of the Web, saying it was necessary to reach out to new users.
US lawmakers have accused tech giants Yahoo, Google and Microsoft of helping sustain the so-called Great Firewall of China, which blocks searches of terms considered to be sensitive, such as "free speech" and "human rights."
But Yang said it was better to be in China than out.
"We have to think of a way in which the Internet phenomenon can continue to grow and reach more users and at the same time comply with local laws.
"In places like China and other places that have different political regimes I think you'll see them trying to react and potentially regulate these kinds of activities.
"But our observation is that it is inevitable that things will become more open and free flowing," Yang told reporters here ahead of the 10th anniversary of the search engine's Japanese site on April 1.
Yahoo came under fire last year for supplying information to the Chinese government which led to the arrest of Chinese journalist Shi Tao.
Shi was sentenced to 10 years in prison for passing on a government censorship order through his Yahoo e-mail account.
As reported at InternetRetailer.com: 51% of Internet users in the U.S. make purchases from opt-in e-mails and 44% make regular purchases from online ads, according to a recent report from Lyris Technologies.
39% of users said they make purchases from opt-in e-mails a few times a year. 10% said they make purchases a few times a month and 2%, a few times a day.
Of those making purchases from online ads, 37% make purchases a few times a year, 6% a few times a month, and 1% a few times a day, Lyris said.
“These poll results underscore the growing importance of the Internet as a sales channel,” says Dave Dabbah, director of sales and marketing. “For most companies, the best Internet marketing strategy employs a well-balanced mix of targeted e-mail campaigns and targeted on-line ads. Both vehicles are proving to be highly effective at converting readers into buyers.”
The poll also showed that users who make purchases from opt-in commercial e-mails are also likely to make purchases from online ads, and vice versa.
Lyris’ poll results were based on 126 responses from a nationally representative sample based on age, gender and income.