Tag Archive for 'Marketing'

Product Launch In Foreign Countries

Published
by
Francis Green
on December 8, 2008
in CRM, Marketing, Small Biz and Startups
. 0 Comments

Case Study - Britney Spears Launch Her Womanizer on X Factor Stage in the UK

Britney physically went to London to promote her new album Womanizer on the album launching day in the UK, and her appearance on the X Factor was one of the most hotly anticipated TV shows. So, why X Factor? It is so well known in the UK music industry and the people watching the TV series are the ones most likely to buy Britney’s album. In another word, X Factor targets the same customer base as Britney does.

Any other reasons? Well, thousands of journalists and reviewers keep an eye on X Factor in the UK, they talk about any X Factor news they could ever found. In such a way, Britney’s new album automatically became a hot topic all over UK, including local magazines, newspapers, other TV programs and even websites. So, the launching news went all over the places without extra work.

Lessons to Be Learned - Hold (preview), Hold (create the buzz), Fire (launch!)

PREVIEW STAGE - It is so important to find the right foreign launching partners, and keep them informed the stuff are you working on. By doing this, your targeted foreign customers will get a preview of your work via the launching partners’ network. Also, tell your partners the official launching day as earlier as you can. So, they can get the message over, and then their customers will help to message fly further as they’ve got something to share with their friends.

BUZZ STAGE - A few days before the launching, ask your foreign partners to work out a VIP list, who will receive exclusive information and resources about your product. Keep in mind, your partners know the foreign market better than you do, so give them the privilege to do the list.

The people on the VIP list are your evangelists, and they extent your potential foreign customer base to the a new level, where the BUZZ is fully loaded and all about your new product.

LAUNCH STAGE - It is the show time! Deliver what you promised and keep all the new customers happy. To achieve this, there are 2 things your partners can help you with: A. Get your foreign supply chain smooth; B. Get a better understanding of the local culture.

Marketing Tips For Small Business Owners

Published
by
Francis Green
on December 4, 2008
in CRM, Marketing and Small Biz
. 1 Comment

The whole point of marketing is to promote your products via effective advertising channels. In another word, spend less money to get more sales. So, it would be wise to have a better understanding of your customers’ habits and the entire trading environment before developing your marketing plan.

Assumption Is Dangerous

Any marketing action should be based upon research but not assumptions, and the reason is simple: you don’t sell things to yourself. So, why do you care about what you think too much? Your customers may NOT like the stuff you like, and the things that obvious to you may NOT so obvious to your customers.

Continuity Planning

Marketing campaigns normally only boost your sales within a short time period, and your sales volume  falls back when the campaigns end. That is the nature of campaigns. As a business owner, you certainly expect to get more value than the quick sales from the expensive adverts. So, before you start the campaigns, you can ask yourself that how each of them would add value to your brand, including product name, logo, and any other trade marks you own. By doing that, your intangible assets will be worth more money, together with a better industry reputation.

Customer Relationship

You need fans of your products, and they say good things about you all the time. It is not too difficult to turn your customers to evenglists. What you need to do is to keep good relationships with them by providing better service all the time. In fact, the easist way to achieve that is to sit back and review the whole sales process as often as you can. Take the TV sales for example, you can give your customer a ring several hours before the delivery time, and then spend a few minutes to set the TV up for them. You can also ask them to fill in a survey or feedback form for you. Remember, every little helps!

How To Use Twitter - 5 Tips for Businessman

Published
by
Francis Green
on November 28, 2008
in Industry News, Small Biz and Startups
. 0 Comments

We’ve signed up a Twitter account recently. After playing with it for a while, we found twitter is really cool and useful. To be honest, we didn’t see its beauty and power for the first few days, we thought it was too simple to receive such a lot of applause from the world. I have to remind myself, however, that all great ideas are simple.

Now, we really enjoy using twitter and found some simple ways to get valuable information for our business, and here are some tips.

Read industry’s break news:

Twitter is arguably the best place to find and follow the industry’s news you care. It’s designed in such a way to avoid spam, because you can pick and mix the messages from the news providers you trust.

Keep up with your customers:

I believe you all understand the importance of customers loyalty, which would make them into your evangelists. For that reason, it would be ideal to know what they are talking about in real-time. Twitter, again, makes all these possible!

Help your colleague:

We live in a world where information is overloaded. But, we also need to get things done in an easy and straight forward way. Twitter is quick in the way of post-n-reply, which can be applied in our working environment. Got a question? Post! Got an answer? Reply! Simple as that. :-)

Turn conversations to leads:

Twitter is a platform and a community, where you can find potential customers. If you go to search.twitter.com, and search the products/services related to your business, you can soon find people looking for help and recommendations. Bingo! Now, you can kick off the conversations with your knowledge. Please please remember, you are there to help and to build your reputation. Focus on the long-term relationships but not the direct quick sales.

Understand your competitors better:

Time to turn your attention to your competitors. It is always smart to keep on eye on them, isn’t it? Again, you can either follow them or search their name on search.twitter.com.

Some people hate their competitors and they’d like to do things to damage their competitors’ businesses, while others try to build decent relationships with the competitors by not being too aggressive. Well, it may surprise you if you respect your competitors and say some good things about them sincerely. :-)

Follow Bizroof On Twitter

7 Useful SEO Analysis Tools

Published
by
Francis Green
on July 8, 2008
in SEO, Technologies and Whatever
. 4 Comments
  1. Google Trends - search patterns and trends.
  2. xinureturns - search engines, social bookmarking results aggregation.
  3. quantcast - Internet ratings
  4. alexa - traffic and changes
  5. analytics - keywords / traffic source / visitors and more
  6. compete - advertisers like reports from compete
  7. search-directory - categories search tool

I’d like to say a massive thank you to the guys developing these fantastic search engine optimization tools, which make our life much easier. :-)

Matt

Effective online advertising

Published
by
Francis Green
on July 7, 2008
in SEO and Small Biz
. 3 Comments

Online advertising is all about conveying a simple idea to your potential customers as quick as you can. Time is precious in the age of information overload. So, you have to get your concise message to the targeted audience in an effective way, which doesn’t make them think and eager to hear more.

Lessons learned from my experience:

  1. Understand the habits of your targeted customers. For example, what websites do they visit on a regular basis? What are their common interests? What do they say about your competitors?
  2. Tell your customers how you’re going to solve their problems. Make sure people understand what values they are expected to get, no matter how you’re trying to reach them.
  3. The ads / messages should be driven by keywords for SEO sake. i.e. 5% to 8% of the content should be the keywords themself.
  4. Tell the bloggers why their readers should be interested in your topic.