How to Identify Productive Marketing Channels

The biggest challenge in running a profitable business is discerning who to market your product to. A company that I worked for over the summer, Call Tracking Metrics, has developed software that makes online and offline promotional tracking ridiculously simple. They accomplish this feat through online and offline custom source tracking.

What is online and offline promotional source tracking? Lets say your business launches the same ad on three radio stations, two television channels, Facebook, and a Google display ad. With Call Tracking Metrics, each advertisement would be assigned a unique phone number, seven in this case, each redirecting the customer back to your business’ actual phone number. Now every time someone calls using the number shown on the TV ad, Call Tracking Metrics generates and stores data for that call. You can review all the data generated from your phone calls through the custom reports created by Call Tracking Metrics and decide which marketing channels are generating the most traffic.  This allows you to maximize the efficiency of your marketing budget by cutting the costs of unproductive ads.

This is only the first step in the process of determining the real ROI generated through social media in combination with traditional marketing methods. There is a whole world out there that is waiting to be tapped if someone could just figure out how to do it. Quantifying the amount of money that the implementation of social media marketing brings into a business has never been done, this is only the tip of the very lucrative iceberg in that process.

"Everyone Has Klout!"

These days social standing is a big deal. It matters a lot what kind of car you drive, where you live, where your kids go to school. Something that drives a lot of the people in our society today is the 'Keeping up with the Jones' mentality. The competition that propels us to work harder than the guy next door in order to be recognized in some regard. Today a company named 'Klout' has recognized that drive and brought forth a product that is used to measure each person's 'worth' on social media. The entire score is out of 100, so if a person is veiwed as a valuable producer of great content that is connected within social media then their score will tend to be pretty high. These people are generally celebrities or experts in a specific field such as SEO.

For most of us our Klout score is never gonna reach above 55 or 60. The highest i have ever gotten was 49. To increase your score it simply takes the right kind of influence. Things such as retweets, mentions, increase in followers, active production of quality content (NOT SPAM!), are all things that can dramatically help your score rise. Things like excessive tweets about useless information, or asking for retweets from famous people, or just letting everyone know things about your life that no one should ever know, "Just trimmed my toe nails, man those things were getting long," should never find their way on to your feed. It doesn't increase your followership which sure doesn't help your Klout score!

So what is the aim of Klout? In my opinion it is a very useful check of your own presence on social media. It provides the answers to the questions like does anyone actually read what i'm writing or am i just tweeting into oblivion? Advances like these are what help create better metrics that enable companies to track the success of individual ad campaigns. Klout is a stepping stone to creating an easier measure of progress for companies and individuals and should be used in that manner. The real question is will it stand the test of time... what do you think?

SEO, You Are Now Entering The Twilight Zone...

Only a few years ago the no one had any idea what SEO was, it was an ambiguous term that had not been brought into the spotlight. Still today for a vast majority this term means little more than 'something to do with Facebook marketing or corporate twitter campaigns,' but for an ever increasing number of people SEO is a way of life.

For my part, I encountered SEO over the summer during my internship with a company named Captico, which specializes in bring simple solutions in marketing optimization to local and international businesses. While i was there we used a platform called SEOmoz in order to check the efficiency of the tasks we were preforming for these companies, along with keeping up to date on all the techniques and run arounds used to bring companies page rankings high on google. A few years ago companies such as this were not a thought in anyone's mind and now they are springing up everywhere. Not only are there new SEO 'Specialists' companies popping up everywhere but the profit margin on creating a successful version of one of these companies is huge! The IT sector of the business world is booming because of this entire new field that has been born from internet marketing. There are going to be new specific job fields created entirely within this new sector as marketing moves closer to complete digitalization. SEO is currently the thing of the future but how long will it be before people will remember SEO as a thing of the past?

The advances within internet marketing are moving faster today than ever before, Universities are just now catching up to the idea of 'Social Media Marketing' but how long will it be until there are degrees in SEO. So what does this mean to you? well if you are reading this blog you're probably my mom or dad so in that case not very much, but if you are a college student like me than you need to recognize the way the world is moving. Having just a basic marketing degree and trying to find a job in the real world is similar the the needle in a hair stack metaphor. Expand your mind to these new concepts, learn SEO and never stop relearning it because what it is today will be a thing of the past tomorrow.