Less well known security firms stay competitive marketing online

The web has opened up opportunities for security software brands to challenge the hegemony of Norton and McAfee, giving companies like AVG and Avast a way to gain consumer mind share, according to a new report from leading market research company, The NPD Group.

Unlike the two market leaders, the ability of smaller, less well-known companies to gain substantial market presence through PC distribution and via retail shelves is extremely limited and expensive, since this channel carries enormous setup and trade costs. Companies that can’t afford retail continue to be limited by their inability to access the vast majority of customers for security software.

“Norton and McAfee have done a great job leveraging their hard-won brand recognition into strong distribution relationships in the best places the customer can be acquired — at the store point of presence and at the point of PC purchase,” said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for NPD. “When it comes to selling on the Internet, however, smaller less well-known companies are managing to stay competitive.”

According to NPD’s “Security Software Topical Report,” the leading providers of security software, Norton and McAfee, have almost universal consumer recognition (86 percent each), and they use that recognition to deliver their products over a wide range of channel choices.

Read More

Internet Marketing Guru and Consultant Brian Horn Signs Publishing Deal With CelebrityPress

Brian Horn, best selling author and internet marketing expert, along with a select group of leading marketing and business experts from around the world, have joined together to co-write the forthcoming book titled, The New Masters of Online Marketing. Nick Nanton, Esq. along with business partner, JW Dicks, Esq., recently signed a publishing deal with each of these authors to contribute their expertise to the book, which will be released under their CelebrityPress(TM) imprint.

Best-selling author, Brian Horn, is recognized by many as the "SEO Guru to the Stars" because of his role in helping many of the top celebrity entrepreneurs in the world with the search engine optimization and internet marketing. He consulted for Dan Kennedy & Bill Glazer, Ryan Deiss, Ed O'Keefe, Lloyd Irving, Rory Fatt, and several other industry leaders.

Brian has consulted with these marketing titans in secrecy for nearly 5 years before exploding onto the scene in 2009. Brian has been profiled and featured on ABC, CBS, Forbes, Advertising Age and dozens of other media outlets. Inc Magazine recently named Brian as "The Be On Page 1 of Google Guru" and an "emerging business leader to watch".

Read More

Search marketing results boosted by images and coupons

When investing in search marketing strategies for digital media it pays to offer images and coupons, according to new research.

A recent study by MarketingSherpa found that using tactics such as search engine optimisation, listing business phone numbers, images and coupons were all effective in increasing consumer conversion and site traffic numbers.

BrightLocal also suggested in a recent study that 37 per cent of US Google searchers looking for a local business would give a company more attention and consideration if its search results included business images or a brand logo.

Online coupons are becoming an especially popular direct marketing tool, as eMarketer recently estimated that nearly half of adult internet users in the US will redeem these web derived vouchers either online or offline this year.

Noah Elkin, principal analyst of the firm, claimed that by using online coupons, businesses can expand their web marketing, while enticing a greater consumer market.

"Even as the sputtering economy attempts its recovery, the popularity of couponing has continued, spurred in part by the burgeoning daily deals space," Mr Elkin argued.

He later went on to suggest that: "Mobile coupons will play a central role in broadening the appeal and acceptance of digital coupons among shoppers," as a growing number of web savvy consumers now use internet services on smartphones or tablet devices.

Read More

USD to offer online marketing training

A new certificate program, offered this fall by the University of San Diego’s Office of Corporate and Professional Education, is aimed at training people to boost business through the use of social media and other online marketing efforts.

“Our hands-on program uses the latest strategies and trends in online marketing to help entrepreneurs and business owners develop an online marketing strategy that can be implemented in their own companies,” said Jodi Waterhouse, director of corporate and professional programs, in a prepared statement.

A recent report by Forrester Research concluded that online retail sales in the United States will grow to $250 billion by 2014, an increase of nearly $100 billion from 2009 levels.

USD’s program will be taught by experts and pioneers in the industry.

Instructors will help business owners and others understand the most important Internet venues to promote products and services. Classes are designed to train individuals to measure and analyze how their online efforts impact their revenue streams.

The comprehensive program includes social media, search engine optimization, website analytics and tracking along with keyword searching, email marketing and podcasting.

Read More

Twitter to Extend Business Marketing Capabilities

Micro blogging platform Twitter is planning to take its advertising model a step further by allowing businesses to send ads to users that do not normally follow them.

Many businesses use Twitter to communicate to announce new products and services. Users elect to get ‘Promoted Tweets’ or ads from these companies on a voluntary basis.

Now, according to All Things Digital, the company is launching a new method of online advertising that allows companies to display ads for users who don’t normally follow them - users will not have the ability opt out.

Businesses and marketers will now be able to send ads to users they deem ‘similar’ to the ones already following them on Twitter. Twitter is expected to roll out the new advertisement method sometime in September.

“We’re always talking to marketers about ways they can get more value out of Twitter. While we have nothing to share about the way that the business might develop this fall, I can say the last month of testing for Promoted Tweets in the timeline has gone extremely well,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement.

Read More

Online marketing: Mobile and video advertising on the increase

Ecommerce businesses attempting to develop new ways to promote their brand could try mobile and video advertising as part of their online marketing strategy.

New figures released by market research company comScore revealed that 63.1 per cent of video streaming viewers were exposed to internet campaigns during June.

In the same period, 25.4 per cent stated that they had witnessed an advert while browsing online content or using an application on their mobile device, with 95.3 per cent of fixed-line users recalled seeing the promotional tools.

Mike Shaw, director of comScore Marketing Solutions, asserted that both video and mobile had emerged as vital channels for advertisers in order to reach modern consumers.

"While the penetration for video and mobile advertising has not yet reached the level that it has for online display advertising, it is likely that the penetration for these will only grow," he added.

This news comes after internet giant Google announced the launch of a daily deal online advert, representing the first time the company has featured anything but the search engine on its homepage.

Read More

Identifying target audience 'is vital for online marketing'

Ecommerce firms looking to develop their online marketing strategy could benefit from recent advice from an industry expert.

According to Mike Seddon, founder of KKSmarts.com, it is vital for businesses to identify their target audience in order to reap the benefits provided by the internet.

By doing so, companies are able to establish a method of promotion by assessing the main reason members of the public visit their website, he argued.

In addition, Mr Seddon highlighted the need for firms to work out the reasons behind the development of a page in a bid to ensure they are successful in online marketing.

"Some businesses decide that the website is going to be the vehicle by which they sell their services, some businesses will decide that it's not where they're going to sell from," he explained.

Mr Seddon also encouraged companies to be specific when considering phrases for search engine optimisation, rather than concentrating on broader terms.

"If you're a well-known brand name you probably want to rank highest on the name of your brand," he remarked.

Earlier this month, the Las Vegas Review Journal highlighted the importance of high-quality online marketing techniques for small businesses to achieve success.

Regardless of limited IT staff, the newspaper claimed that firms could use technology to their advantage in a bid to keep computer-savvy consumers interested in their services.

Read More

4 first world marketing mistakes to avoid making

There’s an old adage that goes, “you need to break a few eggs to make a cake”. This doesn’t mean, however, that you have to break every egg you have in order to get the cake just right. There is a bit of an advantage to being in an emerging economy. The fact that first world markets have gone through the pain of developing and learning online marketing techniques first means there is a wealth of knowledge which emerging economies can learn from in order to ensure that their online marketing strategy is optimally efficient and not always exploratory.

Why do emerging economies need to learn from first world mistakes?

In first world economies, and especially in big business, there is a lot of cash to go around and it takes a little while before the mistakes pile up enough to be a catastrophic failure to the point where the business may fall over. So, what are some of the mistakes that first world marketers have made (and continue to make)?

1. Huge, Big, Awesome Complicated Ideas
Just because an idea is clever, doesn’t mean that it is going to work. When planning your marketing campaign, always look through to the action that you need your users to take. Amazon is brilliant at doing this. They are constantly testing and evaluating their site to ensure that users who interact with it have an intuitive sense of where to go and what to do. Ensure that there are as few hurdles your users need to jump to do business with you as possible.

Read More

Tips for finding customers online

Jay Bean is CEO of OrangeSoda of American Fork, which helps small businesses market themselves online. He offers answers to common questions business owners have about online marketing.

What’s the first step to an online marketing strategy?

Everyone wants more customers but they don’t always think about how the customers will arrive. I’ve seen dozens of service companies that will drive traffic to a website that doesn’t have a phone number listed. Once you have a goal set, everything else will fall into place. Everything you do should be built around that goal.

What does search engine optimization mean and how does it affect my business?

It’s just a fancy way of saying "make [my] stuff show up on Google (or Bing)." When people look for a business, they don’t use the Yellow Pages anymore; instead, they search online. Search engine optimization, either through keywords or key phrases, helps businesses show up before their competitors.

What is the best strategy for combining and optimizing social, mobile and search online marketing tools to help consumers find a local business on the Internet?

Read More

Google, Telekom Malaysia team up on online marketing services

Malaysia's Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM), one of Asia's top telecommunications company, has entered into a year-long strategic partnership with Internet search engine giant Google Inc to provide an online marketing tool for the small and medium enterprises using its services.

Under the collaboration, selected TM SME customers will be offered Google AdWords marketing coupons worth 150-500 RM (Malaysian ringgit) (about Rs 2,000 to Rs 7,000) to advertise on the Google advertising platform, Google AdWords.

The coupons will only be given out free during the initial stage of the collaboration.

TM Executive Vice-President overlooking SME Azizi A Hadi said currently, there are about 398,000 SMEs registered with the company.

"With SMEs contributing to 37 per cent of Malaysia's GDP, they are a force to be reckoned with in the nation's economic development. This year, TM is continuing the focus on collaborating with local industry players as part of our efforts to increase our outreach to SME communities," he said.

He added that for now there was no revenue-generation from this collaboration.

Read More

Best At Cruises appoints Absolute Internet Marketing

Online cruise retailer, Best At Cruises, has appointed Absolute Internet Marketing to work on search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) marketing.

The company is appointing the Leicestershire based internet marketing agency to make its website prominent when prospective customers use search engines to look for holiday or cruise companies.

Simon Colley, Absolute's managing director, said: “The opportunity to work with a well established UK tour operator who already operates a suite of successful travel websites is fantastic news.

“Each year more and more British holidaymakers are opting for a cruise holiday, and with many leading cruise operators growing the number of exciting itineraries tailored purely towards the UK market, there's never been a better time and choice for those wishing to try a cruise. So it's a great time for us to be involved in this sector.”

Read More

Online Stores Have a New Social Media Marketing Tool

Facebook Marketing Leverages Friends Network with Clever Ecommerce Tool

Vista, CA. – Do You Buddy, Inc. (BBB), a California-based marketing company, has launched its social media shopping companion "Buddy Buddy Buddy", viewable at http://www.doyoubuddy.com. After over 2 years of creation, program development, and planning, BBB is set to take social networking and marketing to a new level of compatibility, giving online merchants the ability to leverage the power of the internet's largest social media platform, while at the same time providing attractive incentives for online shoppers to participate in the program. In addition, BBB gives online retailers the ability to custom market their products on an individual basis.

"Social media is the hottest thing on the internet right now," Do You Buddy co-founder Dale Wozny says. "But so far no one has come up with a way to properly monetize these social connections. We believe we've addressed this problem by providing online shoppers with rewards when their Facebook friends make purchases. This incentivizes them to tell their friends about the items they are buying online."

For online merchants, Buddy Buddy Buddy seems to be a naturally progressive move. By becoming a participating BBB e-tailer, merchants can gain a steady stream of customers motivated to buy their products and let their friends know about their purchases.

"Finally, online sellers will have a way to leverage the viral power of social networking to bring in loads of new customers without all the costs associated with pay per click and other forms of online advertising," Wozny continues. "We believe this will truly revolutionize the way products are bought and sold online."

Read More

Google Plus May Become An Online Marketer’s Heaven

Google Plus Growing Based On Real Identity

Google Plus recently required that user profiles be based on real names, which frustrated some online marketers. Though the new social media platform has only been open to field testing for a month, it has shown that it can generate healthy traffic to business websites. The new social media platform has over 20 million users, many of them entrepreneurs. Twitter and Facebook both took more than three years to hit the same number of users. Google Plus is starting to be a significant source of referral traffic to marketing user websites, and at the core of Google Plus’s mission is Google’s desire to connect real identity to real people – and their businesses, if they choose to bring them onboard to the new social media player.
All Google Plus Profiles Required To Be Public

In terms of using Google Plus as a marketer or business owner, there is new information that entrepreneurs should heed. According to Theregister.co.uk, Google Plus users who do not have public profiles by July 31st, 2011 will find their profiles deleted. They can choose to delete the profiles themselves. Additionally, all public profiles are required to be associated with a real name. For businesses, Google Plus is releasing its business offering before the end of 2011. A spokesperson who works for Google told Venturebeat.com that the business product is one in which, “…You can expect to see a level of analytics and measurement that you’d typically find in Google products as well as a nuanced approach to how things are shared.

Read More

A Marketing Partner That Goes Beyond the Expected

Having grown up in Hollywood, I struggled with the pressures — such as weight, self-esteem, and identity — that many women are under to feel and look a certain way. This experience drives the philosophy behind my company, i am BEYOND, a clothing line that celebrates curves and all shapes and sizes. The line is as multipurpose as the lives of the modern woman it dresses: from her yoga mat to a business lunch, to the playground or an evening out.

When we started out in 2006, my partner Michelle and I worked out of my house. Today, we have 12 people at the office, plus a team of external consultants who cover everything from sales to warehousing. We’ve been growing since day one, but a few months ago, we decided to try online advertising to expand even further. And that’s where we found our unexpected partner.

We looked at our options and the resources available to us and decided to give Google AdWords a shot. Here are a few of my tips for partnering with your online marketing agency:

Read More

SEO Company India- A Doorway to Success in Online Marketing !

SEO Company India experts develop the ranking and traffic content of websites and if possible can work on the content management of the website. In other words, these SEO services do all those things that are required to bring a website in it's target customer's visibility and make it more acceptable, approachable and approachable to the surfers and get a good ranking in the course of getting introduced in popular search engines directories like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

Ever since the evolution of the internet in the late 80s, the web has been playing a significant role in promoting different types of business in different corners of the world. Researches and studies have revealed the fact that the businesses that have a proper online marketing infrastructure enjoy a much better business prospect compared to its competitors. It has been further found that the selling capabilities of companies that lay more focus on online marketing procedures are as much as 30-40 % higher compared to the rest. These numbers are a clear representation of what magic a SEO Sercive can do.

How is an SEO Company India Beneficial ?

The sales through SEO companies go up by about 30 percent if done well. What they have to monitor is the websites to which it gives it popular hits, say Google, Yahoo and MSN. An efficient SEO company India has a capability to bring in 42 to 86 percent of the web traffic in to your company’s web page. The customer has to search the important words on a search engine and your web page has to be tagged by these words by the SEO.

Difference between SEO companies and Ad Campaigns:

These companies may seem the same to some users. But fact is that they have huge differences. They are not a paid ad campaign and provide subtle ads. This makes them more cost effective and you can cut down upon the operational costs of your company. In case of pay per click ad campaigning websites, the ads are provided in a separate box or widget. This means that many people may as well ignore the ads. What SEO company India campaign does is link up ads to bought key words in an article, which they are sure that people would click, thus improving tour market chances.

Read More

5 tips for driving a successful online marketing campaign

Online marketing has become a necessary part of every businesses marketing plan. Given its importance, it is critical that planning and research goes into your online marketing campaign, and your business is represented in a way that is consistent with its offline identity. Here are five tips to help drive a successful campaign

1. Quality website

The importance of a good website is often not taken as seriously as it should. Think about it, when ever people search for information on anything these days, they first turn to the web. Therefore, a company website may be the potential customers’ first impression of your business – and we all understand how first impressions last! It is shocking how many websites you see that display out of date information. It seems in many cases a business will create a website, leave it alone and expect it to generate more sales without putting any work into it. A website needs to be updated regularly, with changes made to try and keep it as engaging and interesting to its viewers as possible. It needs to be easy to navigate, the last thing you want is for potential customers to be turned away from your business due to an impossible to navigate website.

Read More

How E-Web Marketing Brings Happiness, Success and Fun to Business

E-Web Marketing was recognised this year in two categories at the Australian Business Awards, with accolades for Service Excellence and Recommended Employer.

"It's deeply reflective of E-Web's culture that the two award categories we won were about outstanding customer service and being an ideal place to work," confides E-Web's founder and CEO, Gary Ng. "They're so aligned with our Company Vision: We exist to bring Happiness, Success and Fun to everyone we encounter."

We often receive comments that our Company Vision about spreading Happiness, Success and Fun - or HSF, as we refer to it for short - is an unusual one for an online marketing business. But when considering the reasoning behind it, HSF doesn't seem so strange at all. Gary explains, "Ultimately, our Vision comes back to the basic human desire to have a positive influence on the world."

Read More

Google+ and the Next Evolution of Internet Marketing

Since the days of the early search engines, the science of Internet Marketing has always been a rapidly evolving field of specialization. Initially focusing on keyword selection and on-site search engine optimization (SEO) around those search terms, SEO has evolved to also now include a wide facet of off-site techniques for generating high quality back-links.

As the search engines matured and online competition increased, we saw the introduction of paid inclusion advertising programs such as Google Adwords and Yahoo SEM which gave paying customers the opportunity to achieve a front page positions through bidding on key terms in a complicated online auctioning system, however again, as competition increased for this service, many terms became quite costly and as such marketers began to search for more cost effective alternatives for traffic generation.

With Facebook and the advent of social media, Internet marketers entered a new era for targeting their prospective customers. Moving away from conventional keywords alone, social media enabled marketers to form their advertising strategies around the individuals' rich demographic information, likes and interests. Through the Facebook platform, marketers could even harvest much of this information through applications and games development (such as the infamous vampire bite).

Businesses could create platform specific pages which set aside the need for conventional email lists in place of a one-click user opt-in "Like" system that allowed the business to directly market to a prospective client via their Facebook news feed.

Read More

Online SEO Course Launched to Help People Gain Foothold Online Marketing

Ontario While everyone tries their luck with online marketing not everyone manages to succeed. Online Traffic Destination, a Toronto based company has designed an SEO course to help website owners understand the different concepts of viral marketing.

The course is ideal for people looking to understand online marketing strategies like Article Marketing, Press Release Marketing, and Video Marketing. The 10 part training program can be completed in less than 24 hours. Each of these videos is around 1 to 1.4 hours in length.

Website traffic generating tips, strategies for effective video marketing, podcast marketing, directory link building, and effective ways that dominate SEO tactics are also discussed through the course.

The course has been designed by Ms. Ana. M. Cruz. She has years of experience in the SEO industry and has guided hundreds of people with the right tactics to increase site traffic. Users looking to book the course will be provided with a free ebook ‘The A-Z Beginners’. The book is a complete guide to internet marketing and teaches newbies about internet marketing business. They also get a set of tools including Article Brain Storming, the Mega Affiliate System, PowerPoint source tools, an e-cover book 3D creator, motion backgrounds, tools that help to create and submit press release and a collection of royalty free music.

“Achieving success in internet marketing is all about implementing success strategies. I’ve divided the course into 10 logical modules. Each module elucidates different elements involved in website promotion. The first module for example discusses about the plan to get instant and continuous traffic. The second video discusses about search engine modification,” says Ana.

Read More

Marketing to iPhone moms, the new online power shopper

Companies looking to make money on the Web are trying to understand a fast-growing and big-spending demographic: moms.

From Procter & Gamble to AT&T and Pandora, firms are taking notice that mothers, newly armed with smartphones, are becoming a new kind of shopping force online. A decade ago, these women were single and childless 18- to 34-year-olds who captured the hearts of Madison Avenue marketing executives with their voracious consumer appetites. Now, they are older and often in charge of the household wallet.

Moms are the fastest-growing buyers of iPhones, and they are tuning in more frequently and for longer periods than any other group on media Web sites such as Pandora, a streaming music service. Nielsen Research says mothers are far more likely to share photos and news stories on Facebook via smartphones and computers than anyone else.

“We’ve known about the opportunity of online moms for a while now, but then mobile technology came along and blew everything up,” said Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst at research firm NPD Group.

Read More