Marketing & Advertising Archives

Should Online Retailers Embrace SMS Marketing?

May 26, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Texting ads and promotions to customers is an excellent way to announce sales and drive foot traffic to brick-and-mortar stores, service providers, and restaurants. But can text messaging drive site traffic to online retailers, too? Dutch Bros. is a regional, drive-through coffee shop ...

Social Media

7 Ways to Build a Brand Using Blogs

May 25, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Branding is more than just a business buzzword. It has become the crux of selling in the new economy. If the old marketing mantra was “Nothing happens until somebody sells something,” the new philosophy could be “Nothing happens until somebody brands something.” If you are not currentl...

Social Media

Facebook’s New ‘Send’ Button: How to Use, Install, Benefit

May 24, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Facebook's new "Send" button functions similarly to a "Forward to a Friend" plug-in that you often see in broadcast emails. The difference is, in addition to sending a message to any email address, users can select specific Facebook friends to notify, and send the message as a post to F...

Social Media

Managing Negative Facebook Page Comments

May 16, 2011 • Paul Chaney

A small business owner contacted me recently. She had received a comment on her Facebook page criticizing the price of her products. In her way of thinking, it would be better to have no comments at all than to give disgruntled customers the opportunity to use her Fan page as a platform...

Social Media

Top 51 Facebook Pages with Stores

May 12, 2011 • Sig Ueland

Facebook commerce is here. But what is sold on Facebook, and how it is sold, is still up in the air. Here is a list of the 51 most popular — based on the number of "Likes" — Facebook pages with stores. For the purposes of this article, a page is considered to have a “store” if there ar...

Marketing & Advertising

3 Crazy Ecommerce Marketing Ideas

May 11, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Marketing may be the single most important task an ecommerce business must tackle. To paraphrase Sam Hill and Glenn Rifkin, the authors of Radical Marketing: From Harvard to Harley, Lessons From Ten That Broke the Rules and Made It Big, an ecommerce business can survive using an Excel ...

Social Media

5 Ways to Increase Ratings and Reviews

May 9, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Today's Internet is largely driven by peer-to-peer interaction. When making a purchase, consumers seek out the experiences of others. This includes reading online ratings and reviews posted by other consumers, which can increase overall engagement and drive sales. With that in mind, he...

Email Marketing

Creating Content for Email Newsletters

May 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Content intensive email newsletters can provide potential customers with real value, present an opportunity to build trust, encourage sharing, and drive direct site traffic. In the old days of advertising and marketing, retailers would place ads in newspapers or magazines. The idea was...

Social Media

5 Ways Merchants Can Locate Social Communities

May 6, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Editor's Note: One of the marketing challenges faced by ecommerce merchants is finding online communities that have an interest in the merchants' products. Few observers dispute the potential of social media, provided merchants can find interested parties to be social with. We posed th...

Social Media

16 Facebook Marketing Strategies

May 3, 2011 • Paul Chaney

There are thousands of Facebook apps, including a growing class designed for marketing use on company Facebook Pages. Here is a list of 16 different marketing strategies — using apps — that can help your ecommerce business. 1. Facebook Send button Facebook recently launched the “Send”...

Social Media

Have You Reddit? Surging Social-News Site Can Help Merchants

May 2, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Reddit is a social media site that allows anyone to submit links to news articles, blog posts, pictures, or other web content. Once submitted, Reddit users vote content up or down, potentially driving hundreds or even thousands of clicks and visitors. Reddit has been around since 2005,...

Email Marketing

Email Versus Social Media: 3 Key Points

April 29, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

With increased use of social media, many marketing professionals wonder if email will remain relevant. The question for ecommerce retailers then becomes where should they focus their efforts, and should they abandon email for social media? comScore, the tracking and analysis firm, publ...

Google Ads

Mobile Pay-per-click Advertising: 5 Ways to Improve Performance

April 28, 2011 • Scott Smigler

“Mobile” and “social” have received a lot of hype over the past few years. To a large extent that hype has been warranted. Sales of smart phones are setting records, and according to Alexa — the web-traffic-ranking firm — socially driven websites account for five of the ten most popular...

Social Media

Sprout Social: Social Media Management Time-Saving Tool

April 26, 2011 • Paul Chaney

There are a number of tools that help reduce the time required to manage social media engagement. We have reviewed many of them here, in "15 Services to Manage Your Social Media Activity" and "5 Time-Saving Social Network Tools." In this article, I want to review a resource that I have ...

Social Media

8 Benefits to Facebook ‘Likes’

April 18, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Last week, I addressed strategies for increasing numbers of Facebook Likes, in "15 Ways to Get Liked on Facebook." This week, I discuss 8 reasons why getting Likes can benefit your business, and I cite research that attempts to assign a value to each "Like." 8 Reasons to Encourage Like...

Social Media

15 Ways to Get ‘Liked’ on Facebook

April 12, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Once a business has established a Facebook Page, a key challenge is to grow its fan base. This is accomplished, in part, through the use of the "Like" button. By clicking the Like button, a person expresses affinity for the brand or its products. It is the Facebook equivalent of an emai...

Content Marketing

5 Blogging Ideas to Engage Customers

April 12, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Engaging customers with both informative and entertaining content can be a key to keeping them long term and making additional sales. After all, what's better, a customer that buys once, or a customer that keeps on making purchases because your blog content draws them back to your site?...

Email Marketing

Segment Your Emails to Increase Effectiveness; 4 Potential Segments

April 8, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

For email marketing, the practice of "batch and blast" is dated. Companies should move beyond this strategy, into a segmented email approach that is more relevant to each individual subscriber and increases the overall effectiveness of an email-marketing program. But where do you start ...

Email Marketing

Irritating Your Customers with Facebook, Twitter and Email

April 8, 2011 • PEC Staff

Businesses have more tools to communicate with their customers than ever before. There's email, text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, blogs and websites — and those are just the most widely used tools. But with all those tools comes additional responsibility. Your customers should feel en...

Social Media

Social Q&A: New Take On An Old Genre

April 5, 2011 • Paul Chaney

The question-and-answer genre has been around for a long time in the form of bulletin boards, discussion forums and sites such as Answers.com and AskJeeves.com (now Ask.com). A new variation ...

Social Media

10 Marketers You Must Follow on Twitter

April 5, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Changing consumer behaviors are having a significant effect on marketing tactics and strategies. New social sites, mobile devices, or other advancements are fueling these changes. Just a few years ago no mainstream marketers had budgets for Facebook ads. But now Facebook is a leading o...

Marketing & Advertising

15 Services to Manage Your Social Media Activity

April 1, 2011 • PEC Staff

Social media can help ecommerce businesses. And although social media sites — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube — are cost-free, they are not time-free. In fact, managing just a single social network business page can be a full-time job, not to mention managing three or four on multi...

Google Ads

Using Pay-Per-Click Advertising to Sell High-Ticket Items

March 29, 2011 • Scott Smigler

Online retailers often overlook the potential of pay-per-click advertising to drive sales of expensive products. Campaigns that target these items often bring the double whammy of low conversion rates and a high cost-per-click. There are several ways you can adjust your PPC advertising ...

Social Media

Writing SEO-Friendly Blog Posts; 8 Suggestions

March 29, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Google’s so-called “Farmer” algorithm update emphasizes original, unique content for favorable organic search results. Frequently-updated, keyword-optimized, topically-relevant blog posts can provide your ecommerce site with original content, and improve its search engine rankings. I have seen it happen

Content Marketing

3 Ideas for Generating Unique Content for Your Ecommerce Business

March 24, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Unique and entertaining content can help engage customers, encourage site traffic and earn your brand top-of-mind recognition. But sometimes, ecommerce entrepreneurs and marketers struggle to find new content ideas. This demand for fresh and one-of-a-kind content may be even more imper...

Marketing & Advertising

48 Facebook Pages for Businesses

March 23, 2011 • PEC Staff

Facebook is not just a social forum to share pictures with friends anymore. Businesses are pushing traffic to their ecommerce sites, increasing brand awareness and now making sales on Facebook stores. I looked at the top ten brands on Facebook with the most Fans as analyzed by All Face...

Social Media

3 YouTube Advertising Options for Small Businesses

March 21, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Online video has gone mainstream. Thanks to sites like Hulu, Netflix, iTunes and Amazon, more people are watching full-length movies and TV shows online than ever before. But no site has the video audience of YouTube. Consider these facts, which are from YouTube's Statistics page: M...

Marketing & Advertising

What’s Your Facebook Strategy?

March 18, 2011 • PEC Staff

There are two sides to the growing discussion of how ecommerce merchants can best use Facebook. One side recommends the setting up a self-contained shopping cart on Facebook, where consumers ...

Marketing & Advertising

5 New-Media Ecommerce Marketing Tactics

March 14, 2011 • Armando Roggio

The growth of mobile devices, changes in search engines, social media sites, and new consumer behaviors are affecting the way that online retailers market. And often the creative and dynamic marketing plans win the customers. In this post, I'll describe five dynamic ecommerce marketing...

Social Media

3 Tools to Create New Facebook iFrame Pages

March 14, 2011 • Paul Chaney

March 10 was a big day for Facebook Page owners. On that day, Facebook upgraded Pages to a new layout and removed FBML — Facebook Markup Language — as the custom-tab-creation code, replacing it with iframes. The latter action spelled trouble for do-it-yourselfers because it required the...