HowTo Prepare a Social Media Marketing Plan

Small businesses are realizing the importance of online marketing and are exploring new ways to promote their business on social media platforms. Marketing on social media needs a lot more than just shouting on yours and other people’s wall or retweeting anything you get your hands on.

Without proper strategy online marketing could become ineffective and a waste of resources and time. But, what exactly is the proper strategy to promote business on social media and on the internet?
Social media and the World Wide Web are about interacting with each other. Unlike traditional media, web is not just listening, reading, watching and absorbing. It is about interacting with the content via hyperlinks, forms, images, and videos.

The first think that any social media marketer needs is a landing site. Where do you want to send people to? It is impossible for a social media marketer to make people leave their office seats and go buy something from the physical location. However, if there was a link to a place where people can go and make purchase with clicks then it is not that difficult. So, the first thing that any effective online marketing plan needs is a website design.

Secondly your website and your business should have proper branding. If you don’t know about brand identity go look up at it. For proper branding techniques you would need a logo design.
Then to promote your message on the social media you will need a lot more than just text. Text is less appealing and you can say a lot more if you use images or videos instead. Using banners and videos on your social media website can be very effective. Get some proper banner designs in all shapes and sizes to use on various social media platforms.

Small Businesses - Internet Marketing - Web Design

Gone are the days when only large corporations considered maintaining a web presence important. Today it is important for each business to not only have a web presence but to also make great use of internet for better marketing. Marketing over the internet is more effective, more target oriented and much cheaper. 

The first step to the Internet marketing is to launch a professional website. Launching a professional website could be cheaper but it could also be expansive, depending on your plans to expand it. Most small businesses start with a shared web hosting, they hire a web design company to design their website, and then they start using it as their marketing headquarter over the internet. 

The big question that all small businesses face is how to hire a professional web design company to do their website. The answer to this question is that you hire a web design company that fits your budget, has the expertise to do the job and offers other value added services such as graphic design, logo design, stationary design, etc. 

Hiring such a company would help you with your future marketing needs. Also a company capable of doing all that would fill your new website with beautiful logo design and graphics. You can use this logo as your brand identity. 

When searching for the right web design company for small and medium businesses, you should always check out their portfolios and read their client testimonials. While you are it, don’t forget to drop down email to other small businesses who have previously hired this company to do their web design. 

You not only need a web design, you would probably want to have a content management system so that you can update your website on your own without paying the web design company for that. 

The next step in your web and internet marketing strategy is to use the tools such as social media. We will talk about the importance of social media in the internet marketing in our upcoming posts.

Lessons in Brand Identity - Energizer and Duracell

Studying the logos of Duracell and Energizer, the first impression one gets is that how similar these two logos are. Whats more interesting in the study of these two brands is that they represent two similar products. Their marketing campaigns are similar and they even use similar mascots to represent their brand.

So what kind of marketing is that where you follow your competitors strategy almost religiously? I am sure that if they each try to market themselves in different ways they would both fail to make an impression. However, I have this feeling that using the similar tactics to reach the same markets actually divides the consumers instead of converting them into favor of one. I think the consumers like them both equally and if they don't like either of them then they wouldn't buy the opponent instead they would buy some third brand. 

So what is your take on this matter? Do you think that any of these two can work out a unique and different strategy or you think they should stick to this approach and why? 

Duracell Bunny	Energizer Bunny