Internet and Businesses Online

Drawing attention to your competitors online can only draw customers away from your own business, right? Wrong! You can endorse brands with content that’s similar to your own to give your clients different ideas, and allow them to compare the things that interest them the most. In this post, you’ll learn how to integrate your own products with other resources that compliment what you have to offer as a retail business.

Give Your Retail Customers Options

Showcasing your own products is a given when you’re selling something, but if you only add hundreds of your own pictures, it can be tiring for customers to sort through. Create boards that contain an assortment of your pictures and ideas, and combine them with other items that they may be interested in. Include additional resources that your target audience will enjoy so that they’ll be better informed and feel like they have seen everything that they need to accomplish their task or complete their project.

Pin and Repin—A lot!

When you pin an item of your own gives you are spreading awareness of your brand to the public. When users connect to your brand’s Pinterest page, it’s because they clicked on an item that they were interested in, and it’s likely that they repinned it onto one of their own boards. As a retailer, mixing items or ideas that tie in with your own products can pull in more followers to your page. Try adding similar color schemes and offer ideas that can help followers to easily connect different kinds of products together. Only group together the products that work best with each other on a single board. The more items you repin, the more you make your own Pinterest presence known.

Offer Tools that Help Your Customers

The last thing that you want to do is throw your customers to the wolves when they are trying to make a purchase or complete a project. Give them suggestions on how to complete their mission by pinning titles and links to books, articles or websites that can further guide them. Your product may be the first step to helping them find what they’re looking for, so they’ll also look to you for guidance on where to go next.

Don’t Forget to Include Your Clients!

Create a board that features your customers and allows them to see how your business has contributed to them, and how they have contributed to you in return. You can do this by tagging their profile names in the description box of the pins that inspired them. Including your clients will bring the marketing process to a more personal level, and they’ll be drawn to your Pinterest page for inspiration in the future.

Baton Rouge area businesses interested in developing a robust Social Media campaign, cannot simply stay within the boundaries of free resources. The ideas discussed in this article dive in to one paid service that is worth every penny.

What is SEM or PPC? Search Engine Marketing or Pay Per Click.

While most of the services and techniques I recommend are either inexpensive or free, SEM-PPC is a great way to pay for visitors. I’m not going to touch on all of the scenarios that could make a great SEM-PPC campaign, as that could get very expensive very quickly, but I am going to talk about how to effectively manage a strategy with the largest Search Engine on the planet, Google.

How to get Google working for you…

Google’s two main Advertising technologies are AdWords and AdSense. In short, AdWords are what you see on the right hand side of the Google search result page. Those companies bid on the keywords you used in your search. AdSense can be seen when you view a webpage and in the content of the webpage you see double lines beneath keywords on the page. The company linking to these keywords pays the site owner when you click on them.

In my opinion, AdWords is the most useful for small business owners that have an offline business, so AdWords will be our focus for the rest of this section. Google takes it one step further and allows local businesses to only propose their ads to customers in their targeted cities or areas. Even better!

I usually recommend software and technologies that a non-techie or novice web master could implement with ease. Google AdWords is one that I feel fits this criteria very well.

To get started go to Adwords.google.com and signup for an account. You enter your keywords (see the section on keywords for a basic understanding) and Google shows you how much you are going to be charged each time a customer clicks your ad (pay-per-click). What’s nice is that you can set your monthly budget to whatever level you are comfortable. Depending on your cost per click, I would set something that would yield about 100 clicks per month to get started.

At the end of the first month, review your clicks and charges in AdWords. Then use your Google Analytics (see the previous section for more details) to see how people are flowing in to your site. Is your advertising working?

Another note to consider,

if you use the techniques I explained in earlier posts about SEO, Blogging, and website design, you may already be at the top (or close to it) for your keyword set. You will need to weigh whether paying for the clicks you would be getting naturally from search results is logical. You may want to consider changing your keywords for your AdWords to cross-promote your business.

For instance, a photography business is at (or toward) the top of the search results list for the keywords “photography, photographer, baton rouge, etc.”. The owner could set their AdWords to those similar to “prom dress, wedding dress, etc.” so their ad for photography shows up to users searching for dresses. When this is done properly, you expose your business to potential customers before they begin to look for your type of services. Your business will be their basis-for-comparison.

Facebook Fan Pages have made a recent change that has many of us in the business world shaking are fists at Facebook. As you know, earlier this year Facebook went public. It has for the most part been FREE. As with any business that goes public, you have shareholders to please. On the day of Facebook’s IPO, many wondered, how will Facebook generate revenue. Ding! Ding! Ding! You now know.

EdgeRank Rears Its Ugly Head Again

Before we go deep into why EdgeRank is rearing its ugly head. Exactly what is it? EdgeRank is Facebook’s “super secret” algorithm that determines what is shown in a user’s news feed. EdgeRank calculates out among your fans which is frequently appearing and might be the most relevant for them to consider.

Earlier this year it was discovered, and then Facebook openly admitted that only 16% of your fans actually SEE your posts. Naturally many of us were upset by that admission. At this point many fan page admins adjusted their strategies to figure out how more users can view their content.

Fast forward to today. The reach now is even LOWER. Check out PageLever’s study here. In case you couldn’t bring yourself to click the link, their study shows that page reach is now only 3%-7.5%. Facebook claims there has not been a change to their algorithm. We just are not buying it! Facebook fan pages have changed moving forward.

Facebook Has To Monetize

As I mentioned earlier, Facebook went public and now they have shareholders to answer to. So welcome to Promoted Posts and Offers. Promoted posts lets page owners with more than 400 fans pay as little as $1 to promote any post created during the previous three days. Paying to promote the post means it will be shown in the news feed of more of your fans than you would normally reach, and friends of your fans are also more likely to see the post.

Directly from Facebook’s website: Certain businesses, brands and organizations can share discounts with their customers by posting an offer on their Facebook Page. Offers are like coupons and don’t cost anything to create. When someone claims an offer, they’ll receive an email that they can show at the page’s physical location to get the discount.

These are one of the two ways Facebook is bringing in revenue. The days of FREE are over. Now understand that you are not paying to post on Facebook. You are paying for your posts to get more reach. If you are an entrepreneur, you understand the need to monetize. Unfortunately Facebook fan pages was the first area they decided to make money.

So What Is The Big Deal?

Here is the big deal. We went from 16% to 3%-7.5%. There is something wrong here. Myself and many other page administrators have noticed a considerable drop in reach. Others suspect what is wrong is Facebook Insights. This may be true, but no one really knows as Facebook stays tight lipped about how they do things.There has been a lot of speculation of what Facebook is doing, but we may never know.

The biggest argument is Facebook has generally made it somewhat difficult for Facebook fan pages to be successful with the EdgeRank algorithm, and now businesses are suppose to pay to have their content reach more users. Many small businesses feel Facebook is putting the squeeze on their Facebook efforts.

Page admins now more than ever must review their Facebook Insights to learn what content gets the most reach and engagement.Once you have done so, start posting similar content. No matter what Facebook does with Facebook fan pages, we have to play by their rules.