Jan 2012 – Tahoe Mountain Sports

I’ve been thinking about starting this series for a while as there are certain local Tahoe companies and businesses that are doing a really good job with their online and social media marketing efforts. There’s no better time to start this series than in the month of January. Once a month, I will feature a local Lake Tahoe business who’s doing an extremely good job with their website, digital, mobile or social media. If you have any suggestions, feel free to send them my way at milena@outandaboutmarketing.com.

Our first selection goes out to Tahoe Mountain Sports and below are some of the reasons for it. In the spirit of Full Disclosure I have to say that this blog post is in no way paid or sponsored by Tahoe Mountain Sports. They didn’t give me any discounts or goodies to write it.

1. Website

Tahoe Mountain Sports website is organized and build with user experience in mind. It is my understanding they are doing all the work in-house. I wish they were using an outside agency as I would hire them right away. Kudos to the entire team at TMS! It’s great to see local talent producing high quality work like this. The website has clear call to actions, it’s easy to navigate, it’s professional looking and has integrated social networks and features really well. I love the fact that you can shop online. So many local Tahoe businesses are completely missing out on the entire ecommerce opportunity. It’s 2012 people! Start selling your products and services online. The site is well organized with items for men, women and kids, plus you can shop by brand, activity and gear. In addition, MTS provides a very detailed information on Tahoe with anything you need for your complete Tahoe adventure from weather and web cams to general information about the area. I like their gift cards availability as well so you can gift someone with an email delivered right to their inbox. I love their Deal of the Day. It’s a great way to bring people back to your website daily. Kudos to TMS for keeping this active. I’m sure it pays well in sales for them.

I decided to test their Live Chat function which integrated with my Facebook account. I asked them a question and received an immediate response. A few pleasant exchanges later, I went on to continue writing this blog post. I can keep going about their website features, like free shipping, secure check out, Amazon payments, etc. In summary, this is an excellent website and I’m sure they are seeing the returns from their efforts in real dollar signs.

2. Blog 

TMS maintains a very active blog which shows they understand the power of search and social. The blog also shows their passion and enthusiasm for the outdoors, sports, Tahoe and their business. Their love for the outdoors is captivating. It’s an engaging blog with interesting articles, product reviews and tons of photos. One of my favorite posts was their recent Yosemite trip with the Tahoe bikini chicks. Now, this is a great way to sell some bikinis in winter and even get the guys interested. Right?

Photo courtesy of the TMS blog

3. Social Media

In addition to the blog, TMS is active on Facebook (2,267 likes), Twitter (324 followers), YouTube (70,959 views to their videos so far) and Google+ (68 people). They are active on their social networks and responding to people not just blasting out messages like some other companies (won’t mention any names) are continuing to do.

milena@outandaboutmarketing.com

1. I enjoyed David LaPlante’s presentation.His passion for technology, social sharing, video, content and skiing is addictive and make a big impact on everyone who’s ever seen him speak. On the forefront of technology, geek by heart and skier for life, David talked about the past, present and future of technology. A lot of change is coming to us and it’s happening fast. Stay with the trends or be left out in the cold when it comes to how you do business online.
2. Jim Scripps gave a great overview of blogging – what it is, how to do it and best practices. It’s quick to set it up and businesses can use to engage online, deal with a PR crisis, help improve their search engine rankings, provide timely updates, use it as a hub for all of their social media efforts and engagement with bloggers.
3. Michael Kelly from ClickMail Marketing gave an extensive overview on how to best utilize email marketing for organizations with a ton of statistics and best practices. Knowing that the average value of an email address is $120 puts a different light to the email database list of any size.
4. Jake Fields, from Treeline Interactive spoke passionately about mobile marketing: iPhone apps, mobile advertising, text messages and various applications. Mobile holds a lot of opportunities for the future. As companies enter this new field with many unknowns it’s good to partner with someone that understands it and does it on a daily basis. Treeline Interactive seem to be completely at ease when it comes to speaking mobile advertising.
5. Finally, here’s the presentation I gave on Facebook and Twitter for business. Someone asked about social media ROI. Here’s a good video touching on the ROI question.

Leave it to my Australian friends to create a useful and practical free resource for tourism web marketing. Funded by the Australian State and Territory Tourism offices and created by the National Online Strategy Committee in Australia this comprehensive online marketing ekit is for the tourism industry and covers off a variety of basic and advanced topics. The free web marketing for tourism eKit covers fundamentals and advanced topics to get your tourism business off the ground or refine your existing strategy. As the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse  says on their website, this e-kit was “Written by experts but understood by everyone”.

The e-kit includes various topics that you can download by themselves if you are not interested in the entire package. It also gives you approximate reading time for each.
Topics include:

* Step-by-step tutorials on e-marketing
* Hundreds of online marketing resources
* Social Media marketing
* Pay per click campaigns
* Email marketing
* Tracking and reporting
* Online distribution

You can download the e-kit from the ATDW website here. Leave me a comment and let me know how you used it and what you liked about it. Have you seen something similar in the US? Please, let me know and enjoy your reading.

Milena Regos Mountain Biking

What do business, marketing and social media marketing have in common with mountain biking in Lake Tahoe?

A lot as I found out yesterday. I went for an amazing bike ride yesterday at Sawtooth Trail near Truckee, CA with my husband. He’s an excellent rider. We started off and within minutes I wasn’t able to see him anymore amongst the pine trees. When he stopped to wait for me, I asked him while trying to catch my breadth: “Why am I biking so slow?”. He responded: “You are not slow at all, you are doing really good. I’m just too fast. Remember to look ahead and prepare for what’s coming ahead of time”. It got me thinking about business in general and how some companies are doing so well yet others fail, how some businesses anticipate what’s coming ahead on the trail and prepare for it by shifting gears on time and how some companies fail to do so and end up in the back of the group.

I found a lot of similarities between business, more specifically marketing and mountain biking and I’ll try to explain my analogies here for those of you who understand one or the other or have an appreciation and interest.

1. You have to be passionate about marketing. Otherwise, it will be just a chore for you. Just like biking, if I wasn’t passionate about it and loving every minute of it I wouldn’t be doing it. If you don’t like marketing and you find yourself putting it off because you don’t believe it works or you don’t think it’s important for your business, then find some outside help and hire someone who understands it and knows how to do it well. The same applies to social media marketing. If you are not into it and don’t understand how it’s applicable to your business, you are better off finding someone who does. Your customers are talking about you online and offline. It’s the old word-of-mouth way of communicating turning into a word-of-mouse way of finding advice and referrals about your product and service. People are talking about your company. Do you know what they are saying? Do you care?  Can you afford not to?

2. You always have to push the limit to get better at marketing. Just like biking, if I don’t always try a harder trail, a jump, a technical move I won’t get better. I’ll continue to enjoy it and continue to participate in it but I won’t get better at what I do. It’s the same with marketing. You have to explore things, try something new, fail every once and a while, learn from your mistakes and keep doing it. You will get better with time.

3. Measure it! How do you know what works and what doesn’t if you don’t measure it. Some people think that you can’t measure marketing or social media marketing. I disagree. You can measure a lot of things. It depends on your business strategy and marketing objectives as to what you want to measure. Establish your goals in the beginning. Adjust your goals as you go along. Once a month or more often see how you are doing against your goals. Unless you push yourself and your business to do better against your strategy you won’t have a goal. My mountain bike computer establishes some numerical measurements for me: riding time, highest speed, average speed, etc. These are quantitative measures. The same is available for your marketing efforts. With marketing you can measure customer growth rate, share of preference, share of voice, share of distribution, share of wallet, net promoter score. Online marketing is especially easy to track. You can start with something as simple as Google Analytics to see where your customers are coming from, how much traffic is your website getting, what keywords are driving traffic to your website, how long are they staying on your site (the stickiness of your website), bounce rate to determine how targeted your marketing efforts are and how effective your landing page/ home page is. With pay per search keywords on search engines, you can also measure clicks (how many people clicked on your link), cost per click (how much you are paying to bring a customer via a specific keyword), etc. Google Analytics is a free program. Other programs to help you measure your social media quantitative efforts are AideRSS, Feedburner and Xinu.

With email marketing you can measure how many people opened your email campaign, how many people clicked on a specific link or downloaded something from your website. Depending on what software you use, the tools are probably already built into the system.

With social media marketing, you can measure friends and followers, traffic to your website, direct sales revenue,search engine optimization,  customer service touches and more. You can get more elaborate tools to help  you track conversion of customers and leads and really dig into how successful your marketing and social media efforts are. Some of them I already listed above. Here’s a good post by Jacob Morgan in Social Media Today on how to measure your social media efforts.

Additional businesses to help you with your measuring are:  Mongoose Metrics, WebTrends, Omniture, Hubspot, and Hitbox (now Omniture).  It all depends on what you want to measure and your budget.

There are also qualitative measures that are just as important. How much fun I had on the bike ride, spending time with friends and my husband, getting exercise, enjoying the outdoors. There are qualitative measures as well in marketing and social media marketing that are just as important as quantitative measures. In marketing you have advertising awareness, brand awareness, word of mouth. In social media, you have  corporate reputation, customers engagement, customer feedback sentiment, conversations, customer relationships and more.

Go out there and explore. Practice, learn and have fun while doing it. And most of all Enjoy the Ride!

More resources:

How to measure Social Media ROI for business

Top 10 Google Analytics Tip and Features for Sales and Marketing

How to Measure Marketing Goals

If you don’t measure you can’t manage: The Best Metrics for measuring marketing performance

http://www.visionedgemarketing.com/

In my full-time job as a Marketing Director for Incline Village General Improvement District I deal with daily challenges on how to communicate better with our customers, how to engage them and how to listen to what they have to say. We adapt our marketing strategies based on our customer feedback. As the Marketing Director for Diamond Peak Ski Resort, The Golf Courses at Incline Village, The Chateau at Incline Village, The Recreation Center and Tennis Center I have a responsibility to serve our customers by providing the best products and services for their money. To achieve this I need to listen to our customers. I’m starting this blog as an opportunity to engage more effectively with our customers. I also want to provide lessons that I have learned, research I have found and real life experiences all in one place for people who are interested in Internet marketing, social media marketing and web 2.0. I will continue to update this blog with all things marketing, Internet marketing, web 2.0 and social media marketing that I find interesting and worth reading. This is my personal blog and my thoughts and opinions are not associated with the organization I work for (IVGID).

I hope you enjoy my blog. Send me your feedback and let me know how I can make it better, what interests you and what you would like to read about.