Social media is a great tool for a business, but only if used correctly. Social media puts your message into the hands of the consumers; they can post bad reviews, trash your product, and advise their friends to never come to your establishment. They can list what’s great that you offer and what could use some redesign. They can also provide rave reviews that result in your sales going up exponentially. Quite simply, that is a lot of power to put in the hands of a consumer – use it wisely.

There are three key elements that you should keep in mind...

If your company operates business-to-business, traditional social media marketing techniques will rarely make the grade. This article discusses why this is, and provides strategy tips on how to use social media effectively to promote your B2B offers.

Social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, receive a great deal of attention for their uses in business-to-consumer scenarios. In these situations, social media sites can act as a way to build customer relationships, obtain market research, identify trends, etc.

In addition, using business-to-consumer techniques to approach a business customer can even devalue your company’s brand image, making your efforts look haphazard and dated.

For the business-to-business company, social media presents its own advantages and requires its own techniques...

Both paid search and social media have been steadily incorporated into many business strategies, but if you have not integrated these two powerful marketing tools, you may find you are missing out on a huge opportunity. Inasmuch as the return-on-investment, conversion-obsessed world of paid searches can seem a world away from the viral and community-based marketing seen in social media, their differences are exactly what makes them complementary.

On the one hand, paid search is all about...

Email is a brilliant marketing tool. Useful for product and service oriented businesses alike, email marketing is “green”, cost-effective, and easy to implement. In addition, email is the primary form of business communication (as opposed to social media). Email marketing is also very effective, netting almost £30 ROI per every pound spent.

However, it is also very easy to get wrong. The average consumer receives 110 marketing emails per week in his inbox (not counting spam or messages that end up in the spam folder). Of those emails, the average consumer will only open approximately 33 of them and will only actually “click-through” on up to three offers.

In order to make your email marketing stand out and up to the challenge, keep these seven simple tips in mind...

Whatever method(s) of marketing you choose to use for your small business, you are generating data. A huge plus for online marketing methods is that you can easily gather information on the effectiveness of you campaigns by seeing what ad or set of wording draws in the most leads. You can see what promotions drive the most traffic to your site and/or the most sales to your business. In addition, you also have data such as unique site visitors, whether those visits were made by clicking on a link or typing in your URL, etc., as well as the information you gain from social media.

With so much data available, it can be difficult to know what is worthwhile to track and how to apply the data from tracking those variables in a way that creates real investment decision value, as opposed to an arbitrary historical or industry comparison.

WHAT TO TRACK?...