Blog

1. Website

Using your vanity number on your website is critical. Some people try to get by with just an email contact form, but failing to deliver credibility with full contact information can drastically reduce the advertising effectiveness of all your online marketing campaigns. In fact, it has been proven that providing your toll free number on your website not only increases conversions but helps prevent charge-backs.

2. Social Media

You should not only be including your vanity number on your company’s social media profiles but on your personal ones as well. This listing will make it easy for those who want to refer you business to pass on your business phone number.

3. Business Cards

Although the power of business cards may have become underestimated in the last couple of years due to all the other marketing channels available, you should have them, and you must have your vanity number on them. In fact, you should have a system that provides and requires all of your employees to have your toll free number on their business cards. This consistency not only improves effectiveness but makes sure you don’t lose clients when employees leave.

4. Email Signature

Many Internet marketing gurus are now insisting that you include links to your social media in your email signature, but doing so isn’t a substitute for including your vanity numbers. You don’t want prospects to get lost surfing Facebook; you want them either to email you or to pick up the phone and make a deal now!

5. Display Advertising

This tip should not even need to be mentioned; however, some companies still, surprisingly, attempt to use local numbers. You only have seconds for your number to be remembered, and using toll free numbers on your display advertising also provides easy capture of callers who do not leave a message and enables you to track performance better.

6. Blog

While you probably already have your vanity number on your website, you will probably find that your blog may receive more visits and that your traffic is spending more time on your blog each visit, so you must not overlook your blog as a crucial place for your vanity number to be prominently displayed.

7. Direct Mail

Direct mail has recently seen a resurgence in success, but without using your 800 numbers for testing and tracking, you are giving the edge to your competition.

In today’s highly competitive environment, business marketing tactics are constantly changing. It is crucial to be up-to-date with the latest and most effective techniques to keep in-step with competitors. Right now, some of the most important tactics involve online promotion. To have a solid strategy, there are certain things you should do, build, and acquire. So here are the business marketing must haves for 2010 and beyond!

• Social Media Profiles – by profiles, we don’t just mean creating them and leaving them, but actively promoting your presence! This means adding friends, getting followers, and encouraging people to talk about you.

• Company Blog – having a website is no longer enough. Today, people seek better engagement. This trend is propelled even further because a lot of companies have dedicated blogs for customers and readers – creating an expectation among the public that everyone should have one!

• Bookmarking Widget – people generally want to share interesting facts and tidbits. Installing a bookmarking widget to your blog and articles enables readers to bookmark, share, and email it to their friends.

• Mobile-Friendly Site – the next big trend is coming: Mobile Internet. Today, more people own cell phones than personal computers. And they are increasingly accessing Facebook and other websites through mobile devices.

As you can see, the business marketing must haves of the future are not difficult to acquire. But it takes a certain level of effort to make them work! For example, blogs and social media profile should be constantly updated to keep people interested. Stay on top of new business marketing tactics and your competitors will be trying to keep up with you.

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If your customers can’t find you, they won’t be able to acquire your products or services even if they so desire. This problem applies equally to potential prospects and existing or past customers. Without an easy-to-remember phone number, it is also much more difficult to generate word-of-mouth advertising and referrals.

Sure you can list your business in the Yellow Pages and various online directories, but what we are talking about is an easy-to-remember number that can be memorized in a few seconds and is easily recognized as being yours. Smart business owners know how important it is to lock in winning vanity phone numbers that unify their branding and tie together their web domain names and company names from the start.

Just having a great toll free phone number is no use if no one knows about it, so make sure to include your vanity number on all of your marketing pieces as well as all communications with the public. Take a minute and think about your own shopping and referral habits. No doubt you have seen thousands of infomercials on TV, hundreds of billboards and display ads, and have received countless direct mail pieces. Often even may have been interested in what was being offered, but if you didn’t have the time to write down the phone number, you likely ended up going with another company for your needs, one that was easier to call. When it comes to referrals, you may often enjoy helping others by giving them contact numbers for companies and services that can help them. However, if you don’t remember the number off the top of your head and you can’t find it in your wallet or phone within a couple of seconds, the opportunity usually ends there. Referrals and word-of-mouth advertising are the most profitable forms of marketing; plan ahead for them. Isn’t it worth making sure you have a phone number that promotes for you?

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Web monitoring analytics offer one of the most powerful tools for improving your online advertising ROI. In fact, web monitoring analytics are essential for guaranteeing the maximum performance of your Internet marketing campaigns. Web monitoring analytics can be used to monitor all of your website traffic, which means being able to test the advertising effectiveness of your different campaigns and how much traffic they are bringing you, the flow of your website, and it’s ability to convert leads into deals.

Web monitoring analytics allow you to track which of your online marketing campaigns are bringing you the most visitors, and more importantly, which one is actually producing the most sales through your individual domain names. You may even be surprised to find out where your visitors are coming from. It may not be the campaigns you think. In this case, you are wasting thousands of dollars in the wrong direction. See which advertising channels are the most productive and optimize those, while scrapping or revamping those that are not producing results.

Next, use your web monitoring analytics to track the flow of movement through your website and identify what is the biggest barrier to prospects taking the action you want. If they are spending too little time on the first page they arrive at, it suggests that either your design is unattractive or your ads are not really reaching the right prospects. Just getting traffic by itself is no good; you want to drive in traffic that you can monetize. Use your web monitoring analytics to watch the flow of your traffic around your site. If visitors spend too little time on a long page and quickly leave, perhaps you are giving too much information and boring them, or if they make it to your closing page but do not acquire your product or service, perhaps your pricing is too high. Or perhaps you need to add more credibility by including your toll free vanity number on your website. Continually strive regularly to use your web monitoring analytics and constantly improve all aspects of your online advertising and you will watch your ROI and profit margins rocket!

A huge explosion of marketing online has occurred across almost every industry in the last few years. This growth in marketing online has not only been due to advances in technology but also out of a need to expand into new markets, lower costs, and for individuals to launch their own businesses since the downturn in the economy. Unfortunately, as with any industry that booms, it also means that marketing online has increasingly become the new favorite haunt of fraudsters – well, in addition to the banking and foreclosure industry of course.

This situation applies both to scam companies selling a variety of services and products as well as companies offering marketing online, including SEO marketing online, website design, toll free numbers, and social media marketing online. Why? Certainly the current economic situation has made many people more desperate than ever before, and they are doing things to others they would have never previously dreamed of doing. However, many of the other fraudsters now jumping into marketing online are those who have been chased out of the stock market, car sales, and the mortgage industry. They are just looking for the next hot thing that is selling quickly and will allow them to  take advantage of people – marketing online offers them that.

Another reason marketing online is so popular with fraudsters is that it is very hard to track them down. Anyone can now throw together a scam company in a couple of hours on the Internet, complete with a new Internet domain name and website. This process is even easier for those based outside of the U.S. Really, nothing can be done in most cases if you are scammed by fraudsters operating out of remote foreign countries. Even if they can be tracked down, the expense is just too much for law enforcement.

So what can you do to protect yourself from scams involving marketing online? Educate yourself a little. You don’t have to become an expert at marketing online, but you should look around and get an idea of what actually works and what doesn’t so you can recognize most scams when you see them. Next, take a couple of minutes to research companies before you send them your money. How long have they been in business? Of course, new businesses are necessary to grow in new directions, but it is certainly much wiser to go with a company marketing online that has been around for over ten years. At a minimum, make sure a company's website has real contact information posted, not just a web form. Look for an actual contact name, physical address, and business phone number.

Without a doubt, the current economic environment requires businesses to be more careful with and more demanding of their marketing budgets than ever before. If you want your company to survive and prosper, you must maximize your business marketing return-on-investment. So how do you calculate your business marketing ROI? What factors are the most important?

Most forms of advertising and lead generation are invested in terms of how many pieces or leads you receive for your money. For direct mail, it is how many pieces you send out; for pay-per-click, it is the number of prospects that click through to your site, and for Internet leads, it is how many actual leads you receive. When calculating expected business marketing ROI from an advertising campaign, it is important to recognize the difference between leads and revenues. It really does not matter how many leads or calls you get on your toll free numbers if none of them are converting into actual customers. In fact, too many contacts not following through will actually begin to cost you more money. While most lead generation companies will shy away from giving you any hard figures on what you can expect in actual closing ratios, the prospective close ratio is still the most important figure when calculating business marketing ROI. However, smart marketing companies and lead generators, who offer direct marketing like direct mail and use toll free numbers for tracking, should be able to show you real numbers from what similar campaigns have generated in actual prospects and incoming calls. These historic results help close the gap between your marketing pieces and actual business marketing ROI, but in the end, it still comes down to your staff to ensure conversion.

When calculating business marketing ROI, what you really need to look at is cost-per-action. In other words, what is it really costing for each new client and each dollar in revenues? Compare these numbers to your other advertising options; then strive to achieve the lowest cost-per-action possible and hone your campaigns to maximize business marketing ROI. This strategy includes doing a better job of targeting your ideal customers and improving the conversion capability of your phone staff or website.

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It is no secret that to survive and succeed in the business world today you must become efficient at testing marketing strategy. Split testing is the best way to compare quickly the advertising effectiveness of different factors of your campaigns. Direct marketing via direct mail and print advertising is one way to achieve split testing and can be incredibly effective and accurate using blocks of toll free numbers to pinpoint the successes and issues with your marketing campaigns. Now with most businesses extensively marketing online, it is also essential to test your Internet advertising campaigns before committing to one channel or strategy.