5 Tips for Successful Online Holiday Marketing

Online holiday marketing can be intimidating especially if you do not know what you are doing or what your company’s holiday goals are this season. In order to make sure you have your holiday hat on straight here are a few tips on how to leverage your online presence this season.

1. Create a Holiday Gift Guide
Holiday Gift Guides are a great way to get new customers to take a look at your product. If you are not creating one yourself, and you should, then contact those who are and get your products on the list. If your business focuses on services, create a company gift card and use that as a great product offering this holiday.

2. Use Your Company Blog
Placing your holiday products, discounts, coupons, or offerings on your blog is important. First, write consecutive posts about what your company is offering and secondly make sure it is viewable on the sidebar of your company blog so users can easily find out what's going on.

3. Contact Your Affiliates
If have an affiliate program then offer your affiliates additional holiday bonuses or gifts for directing traffic to your site. Reward the year’s top affiliates with a shout-out on your company blog or additional incentives to get them excited about what your company has to offer.

4. Leverage Social Networking
Get on your Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace accounts and network your heart out. Let everyone know what's new this holiday season and make sure to thank everyone who has supported you throughout the year.

5. Give It Away
Contact blogs that are related to your product or services and offer to give their readers a chance to win a coveted product or service that you offer.

Remember, the holidays don't have to be a scary time of the year, use it to increase clients, consumers, and brand awareness.

Happy Holidays!

The Power of an Email Signature

Like online social media marketing, email signatures are powerful, free of charge, and can bring in more clients and customers than you could imagine, if done correctly. Nancy E Schwartz, who helps nonprofits succeed through effective marketing and communications, made an interesting point about email signatures:

If your organization has 30 employees, each of whom sends 15 emails daily outside the organization, then (assuming 250 business days) that's 112,500 business cards or ads distributed annually, at no cost. If you have 100 employees, that's 375,000 cards or ads annually.

So what exactly is an email signature? An email signature is a block of text mechanically added to the bottom of an email message, article, or forum post. It usually has five elements including your name, your professional title/position, your company's name, your phone number, and your company website url.

This is an example of a basic and appropriate email signature that provides all the details needed to direct potential clients and customers to your website...

Jane Doe
VP of Marketing
Ajax Union
p. 1-555-123-4567 ext 890
www.ajaxunion.com

However, for different businesses, and this depends on your needs, there are some other elements that can be added to spruce up your email signature including a blog feed, links to your social media spaces, images, and tag lines. For example:



A great resource to get your email signature is MyBlogLog where you can log in and go to edit you profile. You'll notice a new Email Signature tab and just fill in the details and hit get code. The instructions will help you the rest of the way.

Remember, sometimes less is more. You can always opt to leave out your fax number, email address, business address, and alternate phone numbers.

What's Your Online Marketing Footprint?

With so many options on the World Wide Web including social media websites, blogs, search engine optimization techniques, social media optimization techniques, and much more, how do you determine your online marketing strategy is effective?

I call this your "online marketing footprint”. It’s just like your carbon footprint but it helps you take a look at all of your online venues and not only put them into perspective, but also decide which ones are right for your business.

So how do you assess your online marketing footprint?

Step One: Analyze
In order to analyze your online marketing footprint the best thing to do is go through all your social media venues and blogs and ask yourself a few questions.

1. Is this online footprint in line with my business goals and objectives?
2. Is this online footprint bringing lucrative leads to my website, blog, or profiles?
3. Am I just taking up space or am I actually interacting users and potential customers as well providing relevant resources?
   

Step Two: Condense
Using your analysis from step one, determine which online footprints needs to be abandoned. Every online user has jumped on a new social media site and created a profile only to find that they never go back. It’s okay to delete your account and move on. If you can't delete your account, email the site organizer or web manager and ask for them to delete it for you

Why not just abandon ship? Well, it’s important to not look "sporadic" online. Remember, strategy and planning are important characteristics of great business people and looking sporadic and unorganized on line is just as bad as looking that way in the boardroom.

Step Three: Equalize
Now it’s time to really research and find what additional footprints you are missing that could be beneficial to your online marketing plan. Every business person with an online marketing plan should have a strong presence on what I call MTF; Myspace, Twitter, and Facebook. If video is an important part of your outreach then a channel on YouTube is also important.

Finally, there are the small gold mines that you have to research and determine if it’s right for you. It may be a forum, a social media site, or someone else's blog, whatever it is remember to assess the benefits first and it works for you go for it.

So what are you waiting for? Increase your online marketing effectiveness by Analyzing, Condensing and Equalizing your online footprint.