Social Media Marketing Training For Toronto and Area Businesses

admin    Social Media     Area, Businesses., Marketing, Media, Social, Toronto, Training

If you operate a business in a city as large as Toronto, you know how hard it is to stand out from the crowd. Social media marketing (SMM) can give you the edge.

With a population of over 5 million in the GTA, the market is huge, but so is the competition. Social media marketing offers an affordable and relatively easy marketing solution. The key is to learn how to do it right. Social media marketing training can teach you how to harness the power of social media.

The Value of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a multi-channel approach to marketing. It uses social media sites, social bookmarking, blogging and articles to help generate interest in your business. It’s really like the next incarnation of word-of-mouth marketing. Instead of people chatting about you, they are linking to you and sharing those links with friends.

Consider an example:

• A Toronto marketing company has a blog. The blog appears on the company’s Website, with posts linking to other pages on the company’s site. People using Google to find information about Toronto marketing firms stumble on a blog post, which links them to the company’s site.

• The company has a Facebook page. It adds blog posts as notes on its Facebook page. People finding the company through Facebook share the blog posts with other Facebook users. Some users seek out the blog for more information, and find their way to the company’s main site.

• The company also writes a series of articles and posts them in an online article database. These articles also link to the company’s site and appear in Google search results.

• The company’s articles and blog posts are included on a social bookmarking site, increasing the chances of links being shared.

None of these initiatives have cost the company money, yet they have increased the company’s inbound links and attracted interested prospects. They have also led people to share links to their blog posts and articles, which, in turn, link to their main site.

Start With Social Media Marketing Training

Now that your interest in social media marketing is piqued, you’re probably wondering how to get started.

Training is the key. Without it, you’ll be hopelessly lost in a sea of social media sites, and probably exhaust yourself trying to keep up with them all.

With social media marketing training, you can learn which sites and techniques are best for your business. You can develop a strategy to ensure your social media marketing is manageable. You can create an editorial schedule for your blog posts and articles, so you know what you are writing about and when you need to post. (Fresh content is critical to success in SMM.) You can learn all about RSS, and the difference between social networking and social bookmarking. You can also learn some basics about optimizing your content to attract targeted traffic to your business.

An investment in social media marketing training will pay off immediately. Don’t get lost in the shuffle of Toronto businesses. Get started with social media marketing today and get ahead of the competition.

Natural Search Seen As A “Growth Area” As Local Search And Mobile Search Gain Traction In UK Markets

admin    Google     Area, Gain, GROWTH, Local, Markets, Mobile, Natural, Search, Seen, Traction

British online marketing consultants recently released their “Online Lead Generation 2008″, detailing business attitudes regarding the effectiveness of natural search, paid advertising (pay-per-click) and e-mail marketing in generating consumer leads. A whopping 94% of the businesses polled indicated that generating online consumer leads through online marketing and Internet advertising was seen as a “growth area”.

The size of this number indicates just how bullish the business community has become about the rise of e-commerce and the efficiencies and effectiveness of online marketing to consumers who are evermore comfortable making purchases and purchase decisions online. Despite, or perhaps because of stalling economic growth across much of North America and Europe, there has been a significant shift to near unanimity in seeing online marketing as an advertising/marketing strategy that is here to stay. Last year, only 84% of respondents indicated that they viewed online marketing as a growth area.

Natural search, the process by which search engine optimization specialists configure web pages, page content and the Internet’s web domain to ensure that a web page is ranked and displayed prominently in the search results on Google, Yahoo! and other search engines was seen as the top means of generating online customer leads, followed closely by sponsored advertising (the pay-per-click advertisements that appear as “sponsored results” on Google) and e-mail marketing. Interestingly, although natural search was seen as outperforming pay-per-click, businesses still spent more of their resources on pay-per-click Internet advertising,

How to proceed with online marketing is becoming perhaps the business-critical for small businesses as consumers switch to their laptops and mobile phones for information about local products and services and the effectiveness of advertising in traditional print, TV and radio diminishes. Recent polling results released by Nielsen/NetSurvey in conjunction with WebVisible show that 86% of internet users search for local products and services online – up from the 70% of internet users who were looking for local products and services over the Internet in 2007.

And looking is turning to buying – not only online, but offline as well. The Nielsen/NetSurvey/WebVisible results show that 90% of the consumer transactions that were initiated through online local searches were completed offline. Evermore technologically proficient consumers and search engine programs that are increasing the ability of consumers to find local products online quickly and easily – be it a local movie listing, restaurant or apparel shop – either from home or from a new generation of mobile phones with GPS technology that pinpoints the consumers geographic location in real time is changing the way people shop.

Consumer research released this month by JupiterResearch supports the view that more and more consumers are turning to the Internet as a preferred method for finding the goods and services they wish to purchase. Polling results from JupiterResearch indicate that there is a 1:6 ratio between purchases made online and offline purchases that are initiated by consumers researching the product or service purchased online.

Given these trends, it is no wonder that businesses large and small are turning their attention to online marketing as an area with potentially huge growth. That companies are still spending more on their pay-per-click advertising rather than focusing their efforts and resources on natural search and search engine optimization is likely an indication of a lag in response to changing consumer behaviour.

The most popular categories of products and services that consumers are currently searching for online tend to be larger ticket items, according to survey results released by Opinion Research Corporation. Over eighty percent of persons searching for goods online reported searching for travel, recreation and leisure goods as well as electronic goods, while fifty-five per cent reported researching clothing and automotive products, while only 24 per cent reported searching for food products. However, with the rising predominance of local search and burgeoning mobile search by consumers tapping into the trend towards smart phones with Internet search capability, online marketing seems destined to become a top marketing tool, if not the top marketing tool, for companies large and small as the responses of businesses to the E-consultancy/Media-Clash online lead generation survey indicate.